;to. 






JOHN RUSKIN 



BV 



ALICE C. MEYNELL 



I 



NEW YORK 

DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 

1900 



TWO COPIES RECEIVED. 

LJbrfiry of CoBgr«i% 
Qfflcc cf the 

MAY 2 2 1900 

leglattr c( Copjrlgktti 
StCONDCOPY. (^^,3^^,^^ 






58677 



Co^yrigld, 1900, 
By Dodd, Mead akd Company. 



Contents 



CHAP. PAGE 

I. Introduction i 

II. Modern Painters (First Volume) .... 9 

III. Modern Painters (Second Volume) ... 36 

IV. Modern Painters (Third and Fourth Vol- 

umes) 46 

V. Modern Painters (Fifth Volume) .... 64 

VI. The Seven Lamps of Architecture ... 79 

VII. The Stones of Venice 98 

VIII. Pre-Raphaelitism 117 

IX. Lectures on Architecture and Painting . 121 

>;. Elements of Drawing 125 

XI. The Political Economy of Art 129 

XII. The Two Paths 1.33 

XIII. Unto This Last 145 

XIV. Sesame and Lilies 158 

XV. The Crown of Wild Olive 171 

XVI. Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne . . . 175 

XVII. The Queen of the Air 181 

XVIII. Lectures on Art 186 

XIX. Aratra Pentelici 200 

XX. The Eagle's Nest 205 

XXI. Ariadne Florentina 217 

XXII. Val d'Arno 225 

XXIII. Deucalon 233 

XXIV. Proserpina 240 

XXV. Guide Books 247 

XXVI. FoRS Ci.avigera 259 

XXVII. PR.IiTERITA 273 

Chronology 283 

V 



JOHN RUSKIN 

CHAPTER I 

INTRODUCTION 

John Ruskin's life was not only centred, but 
limited, by the places where he was born and taught, 
and by the things he loved. The London suburb and 
the English lake-side for his homes, Oxford for his 
place first of study and then of teaching, usually one 
beaten road by France, Switzerland, and Italy for his 
annual journeys — these closed the scene of his dwell- 
ings and travellings. There was a water-colour 
drawing by his father that interested him when he was 
a little boy in muslin and a sash (as Northcote 
painted him, with his own chosen " blue hills " for a 
background), and this drawing hung over his bed when 
he died ; the evenings of his last days were passed in 
the chair wherein he preached in play a sermon be- 
fore he could well pronounce it. The nursery lessons 
and the household ways of the home on Heme Hill 
partly remained with him, reverend and unquestion- 
able, to his last day. And yet the student of the 
work done in this quiet life of repetitions is somewhat 
shaken from the steadfastness of study by two things 
— multitude and movement. The multitude is in the 

I 



2 JOHN RUSKIN 

thoughts of this great and original mind, and the 
movement is the world's. Ruskin's enormous work 
has never had steady auditors or spectators : it may be 
likened to a sidereal sky beheld from an earth upon 
the wing. Many, innumerable, are, the points that 
seem to shift and journey, to the shifting eye. Partly 
it was he himself who altered his readers ; and partly 
they changed with the long change of a nation ; and 
partly they altered with successive and recurrent 
moods. John Ruskin wrote first for his contem- 
poraries, young men ; fifty years later he wrote for 
the same readers fifty years older, as well as for their 
sons. And hardly has a mob of Shakespeare's shown 
more sudden, unanimous, or clamorous versions and 
reversions of opinion than those that have acclaimed 
and rejected, derided and divided, his work, once to 
ban and bless, and a second time to bless and ban. 

Political economy in i860 had but one orthodoxy, 
which was that of "Manchester"; scientifically, it 
held competition in production and in distribution, 
with the removal (as far as was possible to coherent 
human society) of all intervention of explicit social 
legislation, to be favourable to the wealth of nations ; 
and ethically it held that if only the world would 
leave opposing egoisms absolutely free, and would give 
self-interest the opportunity of perfection, a violent, 
hostile, mechanical equity and justice would come to 
pass. Only let men resolve never to relax or cede 
for the sake of forbearance or compassion, and the 
Manchester system would be found to work for good. 
In i860 it was much in favour of this doctrine that 



INTRODUCTION. 3 

itself and all its workings were alike unbeautiful to 
mind and eye. Men might regret the vanishing 
beauty of the world, but they were convinced that it 
was the ugly thing that was "useful," and that, as it 
did not attract, it would not deceive. Before the clos- 
ing of the century all men changed their mind. But 
when Ruskin warned them that scientifically their 
*' orthodox " economy made for an intolerable poverty, 
that ethically it aimed at making men less human, and 
that practically it could never, while man was no less 
than man, have the entire and universal freedom of 
action upon which its hope of ultimate justice de- 
pended; when he recommended a more organic and 
less mechanical equity — he was hooted to silence. 

Ruskin first commended the rejoining together of 
art and handicraft, put asunder in the decline of the 
" Renaissance " ; and for this too he was generally 
derided, because men were sure that the ugly thing 
was the useful and the comfortable. John Ruskin 
would show them that it was neither of these, but 
they would have it that he was showing them merely 
that it was ugly. That is, he was accused of teach- 
ing sentimentality in public economy and in art, 
whereas his teaching dealt with human character and 
ultimate utility. 

But the moving world has rejected his teaching 
more violently after fifty years, in two things more 
momentous than the rest : it has gone further in that 
enquiry as to the origin of the ideas of moral good 
and evil against which Ruskin warned it in the words 
of Carlyle ; and it has multiplied its luxuries. By 



4 JOHN RUSKIN 

these two actions it has eftectually rejected the teach- 
ing of Ruskin. 

" The moving world " : — assuredly this great 
thinker gave years of thought to the discovery of 
moral causes for the enormous losses of mankind, and 
did not sufficiently confess the obscure motive power 
of change, Byzantine architecture was overcome by 
Gothic, not only because Gothic was strongly north- 
western, but because it was new ; Gothic was sup- 
planted by the Renaissance, not only because Gothic 
was enfeebled, but because the Renaissance was new. 
He saw the beauty of the hour with eyes and heart so 
full of felicity that he cried, " Stay, thou art so fair ! " 
It never stayed, passing by the law — but how shall we 
dare to call that a law whereof we know not the 
cause, the end, or the sanctions ? Let us rather, ig- 
norant yet vigilant, call it the custom — of the uni- 
verse. 

John Ruskin himself has told us his life in exquisite 
detail. He underwent in childhood a strict discipline, 
common in those times, had no toys, was " whipped," 
was compelled to a self-denial that he perceived his 
elders did not practise upon themselves. It was the 
asceticism of the day, reserved for the innocent. 
Charles Dickens did more than any man to make the 
elderly ashamed of it. Ruskin's mother kept the 
training of the child in her own hands, and subjected 
him and herself to a hardly credible humiliation by 
the reading aloud, in alternate verses, of the whole 
Bible, Levitical Law and all, beginning again at 
Genesis when the Apocalypse was finished. She was 



INTRODUCTION 5 

her husband's senior, and, like him, of the Evangelical 
sect. She dedicated this her only child " to the 
Lord" before his birth, and when his genius appeared 
hoped he would be a bishop. He obeyed her, tended 
and served her, till at ninety years old she died. 

John Ruskin's father was a Scottish wine-merchant, 
well educated and liberally interested in the arts. He 
married his first cousin, daughter of an inn-keeper at 
Croydon, prospered greatly in trade by his partnership 
with Telford and Domecq, and rose in the world. His 
sister was married to a tanner at Perth ; his wife's 
sister to a baker at Croydon. His son, born at 54 
Hunter Street, Brunswick Square, on February 8, 18 19, 
took his first little journeys on his visits to these aunts. 
The child remembered the street home, but it was in 
his Heme Hill home and in the Heme Hill garden that 
he became possessed of the antiquities of childhood. 

The boy learnt, in his companionship with his father 
and mother, to love Scott, Rogers, and Byron, and he 
remained nobly docile to the admirations of his dear 
elders. Otherwise, one should have needed to quote 
some phrase of his own to define the feebleness of the 
Italy^ the cold corruption of heart of Don Juan^ the 
inventory of nature's beauties versified by Scott. Rus- 
kin was impulsive ; sometimes he loved a thing first 
seen more than he was to love it later ; but generally he 
loved the customs of his sweet childhood. He read 
with a tutor — a nonconformist minister. Dr. Andrews, 
the father of the lady who became Coventry Patmore's 
first wife ; matriculated at Christ Church, Oxford, in 
1836, where he won the Newdigate prize {^Salsette and 



6 JOHN RUSKIN 

Elephanta . the subject) in 1839, became Honorary 
Student of Christ Church and Honorary Fellow of 
Corpus Christi, and Slade Professor (Chair of Fine 
Arts founded by Felix Slade) in 1870, to be three 
times re-elected. His boyish education had been 
furthered by annual journeys with his father and mother, 
first in Britain, on wine-selling business, and then 
abroad, always in a travelling carriage. The three used 
to set out in May of all these years ; and the last 
journey was in 1859, '" Germany. Early in his teens 
the boy fell in love with the daughter of his father's 
partner, Mr. Domecq, and suffered a decline of health 
in his disappointment. But the friendship with Turner 
(if that could be called a friendship which seemed to 
have such strange reserves) was the central fact of his 
life as a young man. 

The little family took up its abode in a larger and 
more worldly house, 163 Denmark Hill, in 1843. I" 
1848 Ruskin married, most unfortunately; his wife 
left him a few years later, the marriage was legally 
annulled, and he lived again, as though he were a boy, 
with his parents. More than twenty years later a 
lady who had been his girlish disciple and whom he 
had long loved, but who seemed unable to decide for 
or against a marriage with him, died estranged. 

This solitary life was consoled during all its middle 
and later terms by the affection of his cousin, Mrs. 
Arthur Severn, who had lived with his mother in her 
widowhood, and bore him company, with her husband 
and children, until his death in his home at Brant- 
wood, Coniston, on the 20th of January, 1900. 



INTRODUCTION 7 

John Ruskin had been a writer from his babyhood. 
The first expectation was of the poetic genius, but his 
poems were never more than mediocre. His prose 
asserted itself quickly, for he was only twenty-four 
when the first volume of Modern Painters was pub- 
lished. His renunciation of the sectarian religion of 
his parents will be told further on. He was always 
essentially religious, but he passed, during the later 
maturity of his mind, through some years of doubt as 
to authoritative doctrine, returning to definite beliefs in 
course of time. His Oxford and other series of lec- 
tures, and the undertaking of the St. George's Com- 
pany, will be touched upon in this volume in their 
place amongst his works. Of those works I have 
attempted the analysis, slight and brief, but essential, 
with quotations from beautiful and indispensable pages. 
I intend the following essay to be principally a hand- 
book of Ruskin. 

In his central or later-central years John Ruskin was 
a thin and rather tall man, very English (Scottish in 
fact, but I mean to indicate the physique that looks 
conspicuous on the Continent), active and light, with 
sloping shoulders ; he had a small face with large 
features, the eyebrows, nose, and under-lip prominent ; 
his eyes were blue, and the blue tie — by the peculiar 
property of a strong blue to increase a neighbouring 
lesser blue, instead of quenching it — made them look 
the bluest of all blue eyes. He had the r in the throat, 
the r of the Parisians, which gives a certain weakness 
to English speech ; and in lecturing he had a rather 
clerical inflexion. He was a disciple (as in his rela- 



8 JOHN RUSKIN 

tion to Carlyle and later to Professor Norton), a mas- 
ter, a pastor, a chivalrous servant to the young and 
weak, but too anxious, too lofty, to be in the equal 
sense a friend. 

He was broken by sorrow long before he died. His 
purposes had been, for the time, defeated. His final 
renunciation of the Slade Professorship (he had resigned 
it before for one interval in a time of deep grief ) was 
due to the vote passed to establish a physiological 
laboratory (to establish, that is, vivisection) at the 
museum at Oxford ; he took this for a sign of the 
contradiction of the world. He has left his museum 
at Sheffield, a linen industry at Keswick, and handloom 
weaving at Langdale, fairly successful, the Turner 
drawings arranged ( at indescribable labour ) in the 
National Gallery, and his public gifts. But much of 
his work that was not the written word passed, like 
the drawing-lessons he had given to working-men at 
their classes in Great Ormond Street and in the fields, 
in 1857. But it was not failure or rejection, or even 
partial and futile acceptance, that finally and interiorly 
bowed him. " Your poor John Ruskin " (his signa- 
ture in writing to one who loved and understood him) 
was the John Ruskin who never pardoned himself for 
stopping short of the whole renunciation of a Saint 
Francis. Lonely and unhappy does the student per- 
ceive him to have been who was one of the greatest 
of great men of all ages ; but the student who is most 
cut to the heart by that perception is compelled to 
wish him to have been not less but more a man sacri- 
ficed. 



CHAPTER II 

"modern painters" 

the first volume (1 843) 

" The picture which is looked to for an interpreta- 
tion of nature is invaluable, but the picture which is 
taken as a substitute for nature had better be burned." 
John Ruskin began to write Modern Painters in order 
to teach men how they should see Turner to be like 
nature, whereas the " critics " of that day called him 
unnatural. The " critics " of our days would leave 
that word to their wives and daughters. But it was 
a word for the best reviews in the middle of the cen- 
tury. In order to prove this delicate point as to the 
interpretation of nature and its value, John Ruskin, 
then very young, wrote the first half of the first vol- 
ume, and the discussion of Turner follows, with the 
universal digressions that make of this volume and its 
fellows a work at once of unity of motive, and of 
multitudinous variety. The first volume is written 
with extreme explicatory labour. Having thought out 
a certain difficult thesis, the writer bends every power 
to the task of communication. What he has to im- 
pose is no state or grace or affection, what he has to 
communicate is no conjecture, nor does he make his 
way by that attractive divination of authorship which 
is companionable, now at fault, now halting, now 

9 



10 JOHN RUSKIN 

leading with confidence a new and untried way. No 
more than a treatise of science is this work designed 
to bid the reader to that table of entertainment, the 
art of English prose. It is only at intervals, and at 
the end of a clause of explanation, that this author, 
who has excited so many enthusiasms, some futile 
and some worthy, by an over-abundant eloquence — a 
pure style but somewhat prodigal — adorns his argu- 
ment with a cadence, a group of beautiful warm 
words, as it were alight and in time, " musical " and 
"pictorial," the vital, just, and brilliant phrase that 
afterwards took the nation. 

The argument is difficult — difficult in the prolonged 
study made by him who wrought it from the begin- 
ning to the end, most difficult to present sufficiently 
in a brief commentary such as this. What Ruskin 
had to prove was that a few greatly admired masters 
— Salvator Rosa, Caspar Poussin, and Claude, espe- 
cially, — were inferior as painters of landscape to a 
cenain number of English artists at work about the 
middle of the nineteenth century ; but their inferiority 
also to the earlier masters whose landscape was but an 
accessory, and to the Venetians of the great school of 
colour, whose landscape has been mistaken for arbi- 
trary decoration, makes so large an incident of the 
work that the title becomes questionable. Modern 
Painters proved to be a great apology for the art of 
the past, and of all periods of the past, for Gainsbor- 
ough profits splendidly : the antithesis disappears. 
Salvator Rosa, Caspar Poussin, and Claude have, be- 
sides, ceased (thanks to Ruskin's own teaching) to 



"MODERN PAINTERS II 

have the importance that the critics of sixty years ago 
assigned to them ; their names do not stand, in our 
thoughts to-day, opposed conspicuously to those of 
later men now long dead, and brought, in our view, 
near to those predecessors by the perspective of time. 
The slight anomaly of the name Modern Painters is 
increased for us now ; but that name represents much 
that is of significance. The admiration of Salvator 
Rosa and the contempt of Turner, the fact that 
Claude was a seventeenth century painter and Turner 
was new, are things important in the history of the 
authorship of Modern Painters, Let it be noted here 
that a writer to whom was committed by one of the 
principal reviews the criticism of art in 1842 preferred 
a Mr. Lee to Gainsborough — " he is superior to him 
always in subject, composition, and variety " — not 
with an irresponsible preference, but with the prefer- 
ence of a connoisseur, " subject, composition, and 
variety," not being things whereof the first comer 
is able so to print opinions. "Shade of Gains- 
borough ! " says Ruskin — " deep-thoughted, solemn 
Gainsborough, forgive us for rewriting this sentence." 
Lee was a painter more insular than it is permitted to 
a painter to be, piecemeal and literal, and very cold 
in colour; "well-intentioned, simple, free from affec- 
tation," and doing his work " with constant reference 
to nature," says the preface to the second edition of 
Modern Painters^ but lacking " those technical quali- 
ties which are more especially the object of an artist's 
admiration." This phrase is quoted here because it 
is one of many that should keep the reader straight in 



12 JOHN RUSKIN 

the following of the doctrine of this book. A reader 
who had spared himself the pains of close following 
might think Ruskin to have taught that " well-inten- 
tioned " work bearing a " constant reference to na- 
ture " had nearly all the qualities, whereas in this 
passage he declares it to have, virtually, none. 

The evil of the ancient landscape art (Ruskin per- 
sistently calls it ancient, but let the reader bear in 
mind that he is in the act of comparing it with more 
ancient as well as with modern) " lies, I believe," 
says this preface to the second edition, 

" In the painter's taking upon him to modify God's 
works at his pleasure, casting the shadow of himself 
on all he sees. We shall not pass through a siiigle 
gallery of old art without hearing this topic of praise 
confidently advanced. The sense of artificialness, 
. the clumsiness of combination by which the 
meddling of man is made evident, and the feebleness 
of his hand branded on the inorganisation of his 
monstrous creature, are advanced as a proof of in- 
ventive power." 

We ought to note the word " inorganisation." For 
we shall be willing to take it from Ruskin that the 
painter convicted of that is the one condemned ; he 
who destroys in order to reconstruct produces inor- 
ganised work, and work therefore without vitality. 
But a certain foreseen and judicial re-arrangement of 
natural facts — a new but indestructive relation — proves 
that very organic quality, and is defended, not once 
or twice, but a hundred times in the teaching of Mod- 
ern Painters. And only by exquisitely close reading 



"modern painters 13 

can we distinguish and reconcile, so as to take this 
defence and also what follows : 

" In his observations on the foreground of the San 
Pietro Martire, Sir Joshua advances, as matter of 
praise, that the plants are discriminated 'just as much 
as was necessary for variety, and no more.' Had this 
foreground been occupied by a group of animals, we 
should have been surprised to be told that the lion, the 
serpent, and the dove . . , were distinguished 
from each other just as much as was necessary for 
variety, and no more. ... If the distinctive 
forms of animal life are meant for our reverent ob- 
servance, is it likely that those of vegetable life are 
made merely to be swept away ? " 

(In this case Sir Joshua, according to Modern 
Painters^ was wrong even as to facts, and Titian, like 
Raphael, was accurate in his foreground flowers.) Sir 
Joshua separates, says Ruskin, " as chief , enemies, the 
details and the whole, which an artist cannot be great 
unless he reconciles." " Details perfect in unity, and 
contributing to a final purpose, are the sign of the 
production of a consummate master." This is surelv 
a passage of singular difficulty. Truth to nature — 
the statement of no falsehood and the doing of no 
destructive violence — is an intelligible condition of 
the art whereof this is the apostolate ; but detail ? Is 
detail, or explicit recognition of minor facts, really 
the " sign of the production of a consummate mas- 
ter " ? " Details contributing to a final purpose " 
seems to be a phrase permitting the ignoring of details 
that do not contribute. And what does the Impres- 



14 JOHN RUSKIN 

sionist ask more than this ? A powerful artist, says 
Ruskin in a previous sentence, " necessarily looks 
upon complete parts as the very sign of error, weak- 
ness, and ignorance." Once for all, this should an- 
swer the common and careless reading of Modern 
Painters and the rest. 

Leaving the question of detail, then, aside, or leav- 
ing it, if once for all is hardly possible, for a time, we 
shall do justice to Ruskin's teaching by choosing from 
his most dogmatic pages the following passages that 
bear upon the larger question of truth : 

" When there are things in the foreground of Sal- 
vator, of which I cannot pronounce whether they be 
granite, or slate, or tufa, I affirm that there is in them 
neither harmonious union nor simple effect, but simple 
monstrosity. . . . The elements of brutes can 
only mix in corruption, the elements of inorganic na- 
ture only in annihilation. We may, if we choose, 
put together centaur monsters : but they must still be 
half man, half horse ; they cannot be both man and 
horse, nor either man or horse." 

And this: 

" That only should be considered a picture in which 
the spirit, not the materials, observe, but the animat- 
ing emotion, of many . , . studies is concen- 
trated and exhibited by the aid of long-studied, pain- 
fully chosen forms ; idealised in the right sense of the 
word, not bv audacious liberty of that faculty of de- 
grading God's works which man calls his ' imagina- 
tion,' but by perfect assertion of entire knowledge 
. wrought out with that noblest industry which 
concentrates profusion into point, and transforms ac- 



"modern painters 15 

cumulation into structure. . . . There is . . . 
more ideality in a great artist's selection and treatment 
of roadside weeds and brook-worn pebbles than in all 
the struggling caricature of the meaner mind, which 
heaps its foreground with colossal columns, and heaves 
impossible mountains into the encumbered sky." 

Those columns and those mountains get no respect 
from any one at present, but it must not be forgotten 
that the book before us was in part written to over- 
throw them. 

All this is from the later-written preface. We 
come next to Modern Painters^ Part I. Section I, the 
earliest important page of one of the greatest authors 
of our incomparable literature. It is a laborious page, 
in great part filled by one sentence explaining that 
public opinion can hardly be right upon matters of art 
until, with the lapse of time, it shall have accepted 
guidance. The same chapter declares war explicitly 
upon the " old masters " in landscape, and the reader 
has to add to the names of Salvator Rosa, Caspar 
Poussin, and Claude, those of Cuyp, Berghem, Both, 
Ruysdael, Hobbema, Teniers (in landscape), Paul 
Potter, Canaletto, " and the various Van somethings 
and Back somethings, more especially and malignantly 
those who have libelled the sea." In the chapter, 
soon following, " On Ideals of Power," is to be espe- 
cially noted the just thought : 

" It is falsely said of great men that they waste their 

lofty powers on unworthy objects. The object 

cannot be unworthy of the power which it 

brings into exertion, because nothing can be accom- 



l6 JOHN RUSKIN 

plished by a greater power which can be accomplished 
by a less, any more than bodily strength can be ex- 
erted where there is nothing to resist it. . . . 
Be it remembered, then, Power is never wasted." 

(Ruskin, at this time and ever after, used " which " 
where " that " would be both more correct and less 
inelegant. He probably had the habit from him who 
did more than any other to disorganise the English 
language — that is. Gibbon.) 

The chapter on " Imitation " is in part addressed 
to the correction of a half-educated pleasure, since 
then generally relinquished even by the half-educated, 
and even in the case of popular pictures. Amid 
much that is less valuable, the reader finds this obvious 
but excellent distinction : 

"A marble figure does not look like what it is not : 
it looks like marble, and like the form of a man. It 
does not look like a man, which it is not, but like the 
form of a man, which it is. . . . The chalk out- 
line of the bough of a tree on paper is not an imita- 
tion ; it looks like chalk and paper — not like wood, 
and that which it suggests to the mind is not properly 
said to be like the form of a bough, it is the form of a 
bough." 

The contrast is, of course, with work in colour, and 
it is finely made, with the conclusion, for all the arts 
alike, " Ideas of truth are the foundation, and ideas 
of imitation the destruction, of art." On the chapter 
" Of Ideas of Relation " the criticism of thirty years 
ago, led by France on the initiative of Theophile 
Gautier, and generally proclaimed by a generation 



"MODERN PAINTERS 1 7 

now nearly dispossessed, joined issue with Ruskin. 
He teaches that art has its highest exercise in "the 
invention of such incidents and thoughts as can be 
expressed in words as well as on canvas, and are 
totally independent of any means of art but such as 
may serve for the bare suggestion of them." Let me 
give the instance cited in the text : 

" The principal object in the foreground of Turner's 
' Building of Carthage ' is a group of children sailing 
toy boats. The exquisite choice of this incident, as 
expressive of the ruling passion which was to be the 
source of future greatness, in preference to the tumult 
of busy stonemasons or arming soldiers, is quite as 
appreciable when it is told as when it is seen, — it has 
nothing to do with the technical difficulties of paint- 
ing : a scratch of the pen would have conveyed the 
idea. . . . Claude, in subjects of the same kind, 
commonly introduces people carrying red trunks with 
iron locks about ; . ■ . . the intellect can have no 
occupation here ; we must look to the imitation or to 
nothing. Consequently, Turner rises above Claude 
in the very instant of the conception of his picture." 

Are we really required to connect this foreground in- 
cident essentially with the " conception " of Turner's 
picture ? And how about Turner's pictures wherein 
no such unlandscape-like accessory occurs ? 

Ruskin was, it is evident in a score of places, no 
musician. How should a musician consent to the 
judgment that his art should do its highest and most 
musicianly work in uttering thoughts that another art 
might have served ? Is not an absolute melody, or an 
absolute musical phrase, or a harmony — Batti^ battu 



l8 JOHN RUSKIN 

the opening notes of Parsifal, This is My Body from 
Bach's St. Matthew, or the chords of Purcell's Winter 
— aloof — not far, but different — from the several 
worlds of the other arts ? The man who has not 
music in his soul may perhaps be a man debarred 
from thought that is not, in some sense, literature ; 
the other arts, albeit distinct enough, may not have 
the power that music has to prove the distinction in 
the ear that is able to hear. Therefore he who has 
not the ear lacks the strongest of the proofs that the 
arts are not interchangeable. The able eye will not 
do so much. To advance such a conjecture here 
may be something like presumption, but it is intended 
to explain one of the few faults or weak places in the 
great body of doctrine of Modern Painters. The least 
thoughtful reader has by rote the accusation against 
Ruskin that his teaching on art abounds in errors and 
" inconsistencies." The present writer finds no such 
abundance of faults in the great argument. There, 
however, is one. 

From the chapter on " Ideas of Power " may be 
cited the admirable explanation of the conviction of 
power produced in all minds, ignorant and educated, 
by the " sketch," or by the beginning. " The first 
five chalk touches bring a head into existence out of 
nothing. No five touches in the whole course of the 
work will ever do so much as these." Toward 
completion the decrease of respective effect continues. 
We ought not, Ruskin tells us, to prefer this sensation 
of power to the intellectual estimate of power that 
comes as the work is developed. Those who take, 



"modern painters 19 

without the necessary care for precise meanings what 
he has said elsewhere against Michelangiolo should 
check their own exaggeration by the sentence in 
which he judges that master to be the only father of 
art from whose work we get both the sensation and 
the intellectual estimate of power, and equally. The 
chapter " Of Ideas of Truth " entangles us once again 
in the intricacies of this argument. " No falsehood," 
it assures us, was ever beautiful. But granting that 
the beautiful centaur is not in this subtle sense a 
falsehood, does the same dispensation hold good in 
the case of a brown shadow — a fictitious brown 
shadow, even — cast upon a twilight road in order that 
a bright cloud may be seen to shine ? The painter 
has not nature's materials wherewith to make his 
picture match hers ; and that her foreground is light 
whilst yet her cloud shines does not make the same 
relation possible to man, who does not hold the 
pencils of light. Truth as it is in a paipt-box can be 
but relative. This is the obvious protest of every 
reader. Nay, does not Ruskin himself justify Rubens 
who — out of gaiety and vitality of heart and not be- 
cause of awful devotion to one beautiful and hardly 
accessible thing, like the luminosity of a cloud — puts 
the sun in one part of the sky and draws the sun- 
beams from another, and, again, casts shadows at right 
angles to the light ? " Bold and frank licences " he 
names these — no worse ; albeit with this fine warn- 
ing : " The young artist must keep in mind that the 
painter's greatness consists not in his taking, but in 
his atoning for, them." It remains for him who 



20 JOHN RUSKIN 

would enter into the matter to follow the argument 
of Moder7i Painters as its author presents it and as no 
summary comment is able to represent it. Let it 
only be added here that the reason Ruskin gives for 
the abhorrence of " falsehood " — that nature is im- 
measurably superior to all that the human mind can 
conceive — seems to be precisely a reason why man 
might be content with one or two truths at a time 
and reverently glad of the means (fictitious shadow 
amongst them) of securing the one or two ;. not in 
disorganisation, but in the unity of, as it were, a 
dazzled pictorial vision, confessing its limitations by 
fewness, and its love of natural facts by closing with 
the few. If Turner was so supreme an artist as to 
have stolen that fire from heaven which is the light, 
why still there are painters who have not it and yet 
have not deserved to die. But to say so of Turner 
would be a mere trick of speech. Not even he had 
more than a ^paint-box; but doubtless he was the 
most divine landscape painter that ever lived. And 
his great panegyrist magnifies him for the sake of that 
natural truth whereof he writes : " To him who does 
not search it out it is darkness, as it is to him who 
does, infinity." 

The chapter on " The Relative Importance of 
Truths" intends to prove, " if it be not self-evident," 
that " generality gives importance to the subject, and 
limitation or particularity to the predicate," and proves 
it by admirable reasoning. From " Truths of Col- 
our" might be cited something difficult to reconcile 
with Ruskin's judgment elsewhere in favour of the 



"MODERN PAINTERS 21 

Tuscan colourists (local-colourists, that is) and against 
the chiaroscurists, even Rembrandt. But here and in 
other places it is barely just to bear in mind the age 
of the writer of the first volume of Modern Painters^ 
and the half century following during which he thought 
out incessantly the same themes. Wonderful was this 
mind of four and twenty ; it would have been mon- 
strous had it undergone none of the change that comes 
of mental experience, and of a pushing-on in the un- 
dertaken way. 

And this brings us to the end of the first seven 
chapters of this first volume — chapters of principles, 
which are applied with a large sweep of allusion to 
the works of all schools. When, in the course of 
this most interesting section, we find fidelity of detail 
again commended, let us remember that neglect of 
the spirit and truth as well as of the letter of natural 
things was characteristic of the English painters be- 
fore this book itsejf did so much to alter the manner 
of our school. We are used now to the English 
landscape that is the " corrupt following " of this 
apostle, Ruskin, and is full of literal detail ; but it 
did not exist when Modern Painters was written. It 
was necessary to tell people accustomed to a brown 
tree and a tapering stem that Raphael, Titian, Ghir- 
landajo, and Perugino painted little mallows, straw- 
berries, and all wayside things with devotion and 
precision, that Masaccio drew a true mountain, that 
the Umbrians painted true skies, that Giotto traced 
the form of a rock, and the Venetians of a tree, in 
their right anatomy. It was insular then to be coarse 



22 JOHN RUSK.IN 

and general ; and the teaching of detail was liberal 
education. The chapter on " Application " is re- 
markable for its generosity. Austere had been the 
principles in the setting forth, but the applications 
give absolution, I know not quite how consciously, 
assuredly not arbitrarily, but sometimes to the reader's 
wonder, seeing what has gone before. A noble con- 
vention is excused, and the passion of one man is ac- 
knowledged to be sudden and of another to be slow. 
It is rarely indeed that the application of the stren- 
uous principles is made by Ruskin to condemn any 
man altogether, if that man have genius ; the final 
reference is to that ; pardon is for the great, and the 
court of judgment that grants it cannot publish its 
rules. The Dutch painters are unhouseled, and so is 
Domenichino. The work of that Bolognese is named 
by Ruskin not failure, but " perpetration and com- 
mission." The painter of the second greatest picture 
in the world, as the connoisseur, during a century or 
two, held the "Communion of St. Jerome" to be, is 
here declared " palpably incapable of doing anything 
good, great, or right." He who said this, studying 
Domenichino for himself, a student twenty-three years 
old or less, against the world, held a " consistency " 
and knew it. And, of course, the landscape painters 
already named — Caspar Poussin, Canaletto, and the 
rest — are unforgiven. It is through a series of criti- 
cisms on the Royal Academy of the " Forties " that 
we come at last to the detail of the work of Turner. 
At the outset Ruskin traces the foundation of 
Turner's greatness in his painting of things intimate 



MODERN PAINTERS 



23 



and long loved. The Yorkshire downs taught him, 
for instance, the masses of mountain drawing. With 
something that looks like rashness Raskin says of any 
landscape painter that " if he attempt to impress on 
his landscapes any other spirit than that he has felt, 
and to make them the landscapes of other times, it is 
all over with him, at least in the degree in which such 
reflected moonshine takes the place of the genuine 
light of the present day." If in some other place 
such a judgment as this is to be reconciled with the 
praise of Turner's " Building of Carthage," it is not 
here. (That picture is, in effect, renounced later on, 
as, in colour, unworthy of the master.) Moreover, 
when a great exception is made to the general peril 
of taking inspirations from afar or from antiquity, in 
the fine phrase : " Nicola Pisano got nothing but 
good, the modern French nothing but evil, from the 
study of the antique ; but Nicola Pisano had a God 
and a character " ; how is this to be taken as a warn- 
ing by a student who is not a Frenchman and who 
has not abandoned the faith than he too has a God 
and a character ? Yet it is spoken by Ruskin as a 
warning, nearly as a menace. The study of the deal- 
ing of Turner with France, Switzerland, and Italy, 
which follows, and of their dealings with his growing 
power, is an exquisite one, notwithstanding some cer- 
tain paradoxes — exquisite in regard to that beautiful 
and diverse Europe, and in regard to the genius. 
Ruskin says, perhaps, too little rather than too much 
of the un-Italian spirit of the Italy of Turner's work : 
*' I recollect no instance of Turner's drawing a cypress 



24 JOHN RUSKIN 

except in general terms." The man, I may add, who 
possessed not, among the many spirits of the woods, 
the special spirit of the cypress, assuredly could not 
spiritually paint the country of the hill-village, the 
belfry, the gold-white simple walls, the pure and re- 
mote sky pricked with delicate and upright forms on 
the hill-edge, the country of soft dust and of old col- 
ours, the country of poverty, which is Italy. An 
opulent and an elegant Italy of balustrades and gar- 
dens, and, if one may venture to say so, a country of 
the ideal past, seems to be Turner's. Of the poplars, 
of the rivers, of the large skies and the flat valleys of 
France, Turner became the son by singular sympathy. 
Ruskin describes the adoption in a brief and lovely 
passage on the beauties of that domestic France. He 
tells us that Turner's rendering of Switzerland was 
generally deficient, but this seems to be said rather on 
a theory, and we cannot forget the entire praise and 
wonder bestowed elsewhere on the drawings of Swiss 
and Savoyard mountains. 

The " changes introduced by Turner in the received 
system of art " shall be given in the words of Modern 
Painters^ the page being one of the most important in 
the work : 

" It was impossible for him, with all his keen and 
long-disciplined perceptions, not to feel that the real 
colour of nature had never been attempted by any 
school ; and that though conventional representations 
had been given by the Venetians of sunlight and twi- 
light by invariably rendering the whites golden and the 
blues green, yet of the actual, joyous, pure, roseate 



"modern painters 25 

hues of the external world no record had ever been 
given. He saw also that the finish and specific gran- 
deur of nature had been given, but her fulness, space, 
and mystery, never ; and he saw that the great land- 
scape-painters had always sunk the lower middle tints 
of nature in extreme shade, bringing the entire melody 
of colour as many degrees down as their possible light 
was inferior to nature's ; and that in so doing a gloomy 
principle had influenced them even in their choice of 
subject. For the conventional colour he substituted a 
pure straightforward rendering of fact, as far as was in 
his power ; and that not of such fact as had been be- 
fore even suggested, but of all that is most brilliant, 
beautiful, and inimitable ; he went to the cataract for 
its iris, to the conflagration for its flames, asked of the 
sea its intensest azure, of the sky its clearest gold. For 
the limited space and defined forms of elder landscape 
he substituted the quantity and the mystery of the vast- 
est scenes of earth ; and for the subdued chiaroscuro 
he substituted first a balanced diminution of opposition 
throughout the scale, and afterwards . . . attempted 
to reverse the old principle, taking the lowest portion 
of the scale truly, and merging the upper part in high 
light. Innovations so daring and so various could not 
be introduced without corresponding peril ; the diffi- 
culties that lay in his way were more than any human 
intellect could altogether surmount." 

I will stop upon a detail of this passage, of which 
the whole technical significance is important, the dic- 
tion being of great precision, to say that the reader 
ought to make himself master of all that Ruskin means 
by " the scale." Any man who has thought about 
any picture must be aware of " the scale," and must 
recognise its limited relations in painting as the source 
of a difficulty — or rather an impossibility — and as 



26 JOHN RUSKIN 

therefore the justification of a convention : not an 
arbitrary convention, but a convention commanded, 
directed, and controlled by certain truths, and by cer- 
tain beauties salient amongst those truths. And it is 
because Raskin makes the most profound and the most 
searching confession — the best of all possible confes- 
sions — of the convention of relations whereof a painter 
has to make his picture, that a reader, even with all 
good will to be taught, may be doubtful, at the end, 
whether Modern Painters does in fact succeed in prov- 
ing one way to be blessed and the other banned. But 
I repeat, this is to be studied at first hand from the 
book. And the book, entering upon Section ii, does 
justice, once for all, to the painters of tone, even 
Salvator Rosa and Caspar Poussin, and to what they 
achieved, according to their scheme of relations. 
Albeit the chapter on " Tone " is one of the most 
technical it is one of the most interesting. In regard 
to Turner on this matter, 

" In his power of associating cold with warm light 
no one has ever approached or even ventured into the 
same field with him. The old masters, content with 
one simple tone, sacrificed to its unity all the exquisite 
gradations and varied touches of relief and change by 
which nature unites her hours with each other. They 
give the warmth of the sinking sun, overwhelming all 
things in its gold, but they do not give those grey 
passages about the horizon where, seen through its 
dying light, the cool and the gloom of night gather 
themselves for their victory." 

The chapter on " Colour " opens with a very 
famous page in which the Alban Mount, the Cam- 



"MODERN PAINTERS 27 

pagna, and La Riccia, fresh in the sun from a stormy 
shower, is compared with Caspar Poussin's landscape. 
Despite its beauty, and certainly because of some of 
its beauties, it cannot, I venture to think, take a clas- 
sic place, and I have not extracted it. It is multitu- 
dinous as the scene it describes — the enormous and 
various scenery of the sky after storm, and that of the 
woods, the mountains, the plain, and the far sea. 
Not one vain or vacant or lifeless or superfluous word 
is to be found therein ; all is abundance, life, and sight, 
and the diction is as instant as it is pure. The effort 
of this description, whereby, in the end, the reader is 
little moved and yet a little wearied, renews the obsti- 
nate question whether it may not be that so many of 
nature's wonders, as well as so many of a fine author's 
wonders, are too many for one picture, one page. Not 
in arrogance, but in humility, might the painter de- 
tach one luminous truth of natural fact so that it 
might be the inspiration of his work, and that work 
be no portrait of inimitable things, but a beautiful 
thing of its own kind, owing its beauty to one beauty 
of nature's. It is true that to try for the organic all 
is more glorious ; the few, the one perhaps, did so by 
genius — Turner. But those who are less than Turner 
and have been taught that they ought to try for all 
have made bad pictures. And even this master of 
literature, trying for all in this splendid description, 
has not made a good page. 

It is in regard to this power over numerous truth — 
this most solitary power over numerous truth — that Rus- 
kin says of the master: 



28 JOHN RUSKIN 

" Turner, and Turner only, would follow and ren- 
der , . . that mystery of decided line, that dis- 
tinct, sharp, visible, but unintelligible and inextrica- 
ble richness, which, examined part by part, is to the 
eye nothing but confusion and defeat, which, taken as 
a whole, is all unity, symmetry, and truth." 

Ruskin shows us, in another place, how each of 
the touches of nature is unique and diverse, so that 
though we cannot tell what such or such a touch 
may be, yet we know " it cannot be any thing " ; 
while even the most dexterous distances of Salvator 
or Poussin " pretend to secrecy without having any- 
thing to conceal, and are ambiguous, not from the 
concentration of meaning, but from the want of it." 
This excellent sentence is from those greatly scientific 
chapters on "Truth of Colour," "Truth of Chiaro- 
scuro," " Truth of Space " as dependent on the focus 
of the eye, wherein also we read that " Nature is 
never distinct and never vacant, . . . always 
mysterious, but always abundant ; you always see 
something, but you never see all " ; that the Italians 
were vacant, and the Dutch distinct, " Nature's rule 
being . . . ' you shall never be able to count 
the bricks, but you shall never see a dead wall ' " ; 
and that " Turner introduced a new era in landscape 
art by showing that the foreground might be sunk for 
the distance, and that it was possible to express im- 
mediate proximity to the spectator without giving 
anything like completeness to the forms of the near 
objects." This, Turner accomplished, not by " slurred 
or soft lines (always the sign of vice in art), but by a 



"MODERN PAINTERS 29 

decisive imperfection, a firm, but partial, assertion of 
form, which the eye feels indeed to be close home to 
it, and yet cannot rest upon, nor cling to, nor en- 
tirely understand." And let the following passages 
be quoted from the chapters on " Colour " and 
" Shadow " before we pass to the chapters on " Skies " 
and " Mountains " : " The ordinary tinsel and trash 
. . . with which the walls of our Academy are 
half covered ... is based on a system of col- 
our beside which Turner's is as Vesta to Cotytto — 
the chastity of fire to the foulness of earth." " There 
is scarcely an artist of the present day . . . who 
does not employ more pure and raw colour than 
Turner." Then follows the memorable judgment on 
colour : " I think that the first approach to vicious- 
ness of colour ... is commonly indicated 
chiefly by a prevalence of purple and absence of yel- 
low " ; for Ruskin makes us aware of the almost se- 
cret gold of fine colour. Rubens and Turner had, 
like nature, yellow and black as a " fundamental op- 
position." In the chapter " Of Truth of Chiaro- 
scuro " Ruskin writes : 

" If we have to express vivid light, our first aim 
must be to get the shadows sharp and visible ; and 
this is not to be done by blackness, . . . but by 
keeping them perfectly flat, keen, and even. A very 
pale shadow, if it be kept flat, if it conceal the details 
of the object it crosses, if it be grey and cold com- 
pared with their colour, and very sharp-edged, will be 
far more conspicuous, and make everything out of it 
look a great deal more like sunlight than a shadow 
ten times its depth, shaded ofF at the edge, and con- 



30 JOHN RUSKIN 

founded with the colour of the object on which it 
falls. Now the old masters of the Italian school 
directly reverse the principle; they blacken 
their shadows till the picture becomes quite appalling, 
and everything in it is invisible ; but they make a 
point of losing their edges, and carrying them off by 
gradation." 

Turner will keep the shadows " clear and distinct, 
and make them felt as shadows, though they are so 
faint that, but for their decisive forms, we should not 
have observed them for darkness at all." Turner's 
shadows are, like nature's, shot with light. 

"Words are not accurate enough, nor delicate 
enough, to express or trace the constant, all-pervading 
influence of the finer and vaguer shadows throughout 
his works, that thrilling influence which gives to the 
light they leave its passion and its power." 

Three chapters record the study of the three re- 
gions of cloud — the " neglected upper sky " (neg- 
lected until Turner drew the cirrus), the middle 
cloud, and the rain-cloud. There is the noblest pleas- 
ure in the writer's confession that he has to find the 
same words in describing a foreground of nature's 
and a foreground of Turner's, and that delight is sensi- 
bly expressed in the paragraphs on the real and authentic 
skies, closing with Turner, who had more knowledge 
of all essential truth " in every wreath of vapour 
than composed the whole stock of heavenly informa- 
tion which lasted Cuyp and Claude their lives." 
Turner has infinity in forms of cloud, too mysterious 
— in wave of cloud and light — to be tested by the 



"MODERN PAINTERS 3 1 

eye : infinity outsoaring the mere numbers achieved 
by lesser painters. " For . . . the greatest num- 
ber is no nearer to infinity than the least, if it be defi- 
nite number," while infinity is reached by the mere 
hints of the variety and obscurity of truth. This is 
in the upper heavens; the lower heavens of the rain- 
cloud have been the material of nearly all the bad 
pictures in all the schools : the two windy Caspar 
Poussins in our National Gallery, for example : 

'' Massive concretions of ink and indigo, wrung 
and twisted very hard, apparently in a vain effort, to 
get some moisture out of them ; bearing up coura- 
geously and successfully against a wind whose effects 
on the trees in the foreground can be accounted for 
only on the supposition that they are all of the india- 
rubber species." 

But Ruskin gives some praise to modern artists — 
Cox and De Wint and Copley Fielding — " before we 
ascend the solitary throne." 

After the heavens come the heavenly mountains, 
whereof, at this early age, Ruskin had studied the 
whole organisation, to find it, with a rapture of recog- 
nition, confessed in the work of Turner and suggested 
in every lightest line. In these chapters the subject 
is less closely a piece of reasoning than in the hard, 
urgent, and busy first chapters, upon which I have 
dwelt at length because of their singular importance ; 
but the motive is still explanation, demonstration ; the 
paragraph is hard at work, and only at the closes do 
we find the relaxation of beauty. In this book Ruskin 



30 JOHN RUSKIN 

founded with the colour of the object on which it 
falls. Now the old masters of the Italian school 
. directly reverse the principle ; they blacken 
their shadows till the picture becomes quite appalling, 
and everything in it is invisible ; but they make a 
point of losing their edges, and carrying them off by 
gradation." 

Turner will keep the shadows " clear and distinct, 
and make them felt as shadows, though they are so 
faint that, but for their decisive forms, we should not 
have observed them for darkness at all." Turner's 
shadows are, like nature's, shot with light. 

"Words are not accurate enough, nor delicate 
enough, to express or trace the constant, all-pervading 
influence of the finer and vaguer shadows throughout 
his works, that thrilling influence which gives to the 
light they leave its passion and its power." 

Three chapters record the study of the three re- 
gions of cloud — the " neglected upper sky " (neg- 
lected until Turner drew the cirrus), the middle 
cloud, and the rain-cloud. There is the noblest pleas- 
ure in the writer's confession that he has to find the 
same words in describing a foreground of nature's 
and a foreground of Turner's, and that delight is sensi- 
bly expressed in the paragraphs on the real and authentic 
skies, closing with Turner, who had more knowledge 
of all essential truth " in every wreath of vapour 
than composed the whole stock of heavenly informa- 
tion which lasted Cuyp and Claude their lives." 
Turner has infinity in forms of cloud, too mysterious 
— in wave of cloud and light — to be tested by the 



"MODERN PAINTERS 31 

eye : infinity outsoaring the mere numbers achieved 
by lesser painters. " For . . . the greatest num- 
ber is no nearer to infinity than the least, if it be defi- 
nite number," while infinity is reached by the mere 
hints of the variety and obscurity of truth. This is 
in the upper heavens; the lower heavens of the rain- 
cloud have been the material of nearly all the bad 
pictures in all the schools : the two windy Gaspar 
Poussins in our National Gallery, for example : 

" Massive concretions of ink and indigo, wrung 
and twisted very hard, apparently in a vain effort, to 
get some moisture out of them ; bearing up coura- 
geously and successfully against a wind whose effects 
on the trees in the foreground can be accounted for 
only on the supposition that they are all of the india- 
rubber species." 

But Ruskin gives some praise to modern artists — 
Cox and De Wint and Copley Fielding — " before we 
ascend the solitary throne." 

After the heavens come the heavenly mountains, 
whereof, at this early age, Ruskin had studied the 
whole organisation, to find it, with a rapture of recog- 
nition, confessed in the work of Turner and suggested 
in every lightest line. In these chapters the subject 
is less closely a piece of reasoning than in the hard, 
urgent, and busy first chapters, upon which I have 
dwelt at length because of their singular importance ; 
but the motive is still explanation, demonstration ; the 
paragraph is hard at work, and only at the closes do 
we find the relaxation of beauty. In this book Ruskin 



34 JOHN RUSKIN 

him ill-satisfied with the simple and single painting of 
calm waters, which painters of moderate powers are 
able to do artistically, giving keen pleasure thereby, 
but giving it easily, and urges him to study rather the 
painting of the broken sea, the shifting surface, and 
the cataract. The question arises in the reader's 
mind yet again whether this noble teaching, which 
would, if it were possible, make another Turner, has 
not in fact made, in the lower places, many bad 
painters. And yet his refutation of the bad painters 
of a quite different kind — those whom his teaching 
did not make and could not make — and his immediate 
appeal to the nature they disintegrated by the shatter- 
ing effect of their negligence and the insolence of their 
reconstruction, are true master's work in this section 
on the sea, and in that which follows, on vegetation. 
Such is the lesson on the passage of the cataract from 
the spring to the fall, when the parabolic curve ceases, 
whereas the false painters carry that curve to the end 
and make their water look active where it should be 
wildly subject to gravitation. Such is the study of the 
waves seen, from the sea shoreward, not as successive 
breakers, but as the self-same water repeating its 
crash with the perturbed spirit of the sea. Such also 
is the study of the top of the nodding wave when " the 
water swings and jumps along the ridge like a shaken 
chain." Such is the history of the growth of a tree, 
and the statement of the laws of its delimitation of 
outline, and of its angles, which the wildest wind that 
ever blew on earth cannot take out, though from a 
twig but an inch thick, whereas Caspar Poussin's wind 



" MODERN PAINTERS 35 

Stretches the branches in curves. Of his sea-chapter, 
Ruskin himself says in a note : " It is a good study of 
wild weather ; but utterly feeble in comparison to 
the few words by which any of the great poets will 
describe sea. . . . There is nothing in sea de- 
scription, detailed, like Dickens's storm in * David Cop- 
perfield.' " 

In this book, as in others, Ruskin (perhaps, as I 
have suggested, for lack of music, and in default, 
therefore, of a sense of the separateness of an art 
that imitates nothing) spends the riches of his mind 
upon the perpetual, and in some kind insoluble, ques- 
tion as to the imitation and selection of nature in 
painting. Upon this he has said many things — con- 
tending things as even a careful student may hold, 
contrary things as the careless will continue to think. 
May we not regret the arduous thought spent upon 
an ambiguous dispute that is nearly an ambiguous 
quarrel ? If he had been learned in music, an art 
wherein such contention finds no place, would he 
have made it the centre of his argument on painting .? 



CHAPTER III 

"modern painters" 

the second volume (1846) 

"The Second Volume of Modern Painters vsiWxf^^ 
though in affected language, yet with sincere and very 
deep feeling, expresses the first and fundamental law 
respecting human contemplation of the natural phe- 
nomena under whose influence we exist — that they 
can only be seen with their properly belonging joy 
and interpreted up to the measure of proper human 
intelligence, when they are accepted as the work and 
the gift of a Living Spirit greater than our own " — so 
runs Ruskin's description of this book. It passes to 
the study of the Theoretic Faculty, and teaches us to 
account for the beauty we are formed to perceive by 
referring it to the attributes of God. In front of this 
essay stands a moral apology for art, as accessory to 
the " human dignity and heavenward duty " of man- 
kind, informing the spirit of the artist by " the incor- 
ruptible and earnest pride which no applause, no rep- 
robation, can blind to its shortcomings, or beguile of 
its hope." Spirituality and morality have done ill to 
forego their divine claim to that art whereto they had 
a right not only of authority but of very origin and 
essence. And in the literally divine gift of art is im- 
plied the responsibility of choice, so that men are 
36 



"modern painters 37 

bound to authentic and incorrupt beauty in art as they 
are bound to justice in action. The happiness which 
the senses and their spirit take in the good which they 
contemplate and follow is itself, by its very energy, a 
sure rule of choice ; " it clasps what it loves so hard, 
that it crushes it if it be hollow." And this happi- 
ness, far too high to be called " aesthetic," Ruskin 
names the Theoretic Faculty. 

"We must advance, as we live on, from what is 
brilliant to what is pure, and from what is promised 
to what is fulfilled, and from what is our strength to 
what is our crown, only observing in all things how 
that which is indeed wrong, and to be cut up from the 
root, is dislike [of natural things] and not affection." 

Beauty is "the bread of the soul," for which vir- 
ginal hunger is renewed every morning. And good 
genius was infallibly imaginative in the days before 
men had " begun to bring to the cross foot their sys- 
tems instead of their sorrow." From this noble doc- 
trine to the conclusion that a false and impious man 
could not be a great imaginative painter (a judgment 
that has been cast in Ruskin's teeth a thousand times), 
the logic of a young man carried him, not in haste 
indeed but with the current of deliberate and inten- 
tional decision. " I do not think," said Socrates, 
" that any one who should now hear us, even though 
he were a comic poet, would say that I talk idly or 
discourse on matters that concern me not " ; but the 
comic, or more properly the derisive, humour of Eng- 
lish writers has not forborne to accuse Ruskin of that 



38 JOHN RUSKIN 

which Socrates had confidence would be forborne in 
his own regard : to charge with vanity an inquiry that 
concerned man and the honour of his works. And 
if the question has been held so vain, what common 
contempt has not mocked the answer framed in the 
too instant need that a great mind had to be satisfied ! 
In preparation of his task of referring what we see 
to be beautiful to what we believe to be Eternal, Rus- 
kin stays upon the old speculation as to the nature of 
the beauty that so delights our discerning senses as to 
cause us to refer the felicity to qualities of God. 
Among attempted " definitions " of beauty (which are 
descriptions rather than definitions) he does not cite 
the scholastic sentence " Splendour of Truth," which 
would have pleased him had he known it, but which 
does not explain why the aspect of truth is only 
sometimes splendid; he does quote the vaguer "kind 
of felicity " of Bacon, which fails to explain the kind. 
" Nothing is more common," Ruskin says in the 
following volume, " than to hear people who desire to 
be thought philosophical, declare that * beauty is 
truth ' and ' truth is beauty.' I would most earnestly 
beg every sensible person who hears such an assertion 
made, to nip the germinating philosopher in his am- 
biguous bud ; and beg him, if he really believes his 
own assertion, never henceforward to use two words 
for the same thing." The succeeding chapters on 
"Unity," "Infinity," "Repose," "Moderation," are 
masterly in thought, with passages close and fine, as 
that which discovers the "reason of the agreeable- 
ness " of a curve — that it " divides itself infinitely by 



" MODERN PAINTERS 39 

its changes of direction " ; that which asserts " the 
inseparable dependence " of spirits on each other's 
being, and their " essential and perfect depending on 
their Creator's " ; and the noble page on " Unity " : 
Subjectional Unity of things submitted to the same 
influence, which is that of clouds in the wind ; Unity 
of Origin, which is that of branches of a tree ; 
Unity of Sequence, which is that of continued lines 
or the notes following to make a melody ; and Unity 
of Membership, " which is the unity of things sep- 
arately imperfect in a perfect whole," as in the notes 
joining to make a harmony, and, in spiritual creatures, 
their essential life of happiness in the Creator Spirit. 
Inordinate variety (such as that of the colouring of 
some tropical birds) is a defect of the beauty of Unity. 
The dark background is presented to us (and here 
Ruskin seems perilously to strain a principle in the 
application) as a denial of the beauty of Infinity. 

"I think if there be any one grand division, by 
which it is at all possible to set the productions of 
painting, so far as their mere plan or system is con- 
cerned, on our right and left hands, it is this of light 
and dark background, of heaven light or of object 
light." 

The abruptness and confidence of the theological 
assertions, Ruskin protests in a note, became painful 
to him in after years, but their matter is involved in 
every thought of this essay. Nothing else is retracted 
in the revision except something of the veneration 
given to Michelangiolo, of the love given to Raphael 



40 JOHN RUSKIN 

and to Francia, and of a young man's love of the for- 
est and the wild landscape, in impatience of the lovely 
country of agriculture. 

The latter part of the second volume is principally 
a treatise on " Imagination " — Associative, Penetra- 
tive, and Contemplative — a great work of true intel- 
lectual passion ; and the poverty of any words that 
try to present the argument by way of mere sketch 
must discourage me from the attempt ; howbeit the 
task I have set myself throughout is no less than this 
almost impossible summary, the reader will do well to 
be more than ever on his guard in order to take the 
citations as signs and fragments of the perfect life of 
the work. Let it be said at once that no man could 
think out the multitude of truths without the use of 
opposing phrases. It would have been well if in the 
subsequent revision for later issues (especially the 
thorough revision of 1883) Ruskin had altered the 
mere diction of the doctrine as to choice in art. The 
reader must be warned not to put this amongst the 
reputed " inconsistencies " until he has read the fourth 
volume, where the paradox is explained. The real 
"inconsistencies" are few, and only a reader baffled 
by the consistency (and there is nothing so exacting, 
so difficult, so various, as the consistency of a com- 
plete theory, nothing so overwhelming to a slothful 
student) has ever diverted himself by counting them. 
At the outset Ruskin encounters — by another of those 
originally paltry accidents that are of use — the defini- 
tion of Imagination by Dugald Stewart, who does not 
know imagination from composition, or recomposi- 



"MODERN PAINTERS 4I 

tion, and thinks imagination in landscape to consist 
in the imaginary landscape of gathering or colloca- 
tion. It is not this, as no one needs to be told to- 
day, but we owe our knowledge in great part to Rus- 
kin's contention ; and the word imagination itself 
(originally " aesthetic," or sensual, and defective) is 
what it is now by his own act of transformation. 
Imagination does not combine, but is pre-engaged 
upon more vital work. In fact the chapter on Im- 
agination Associative does some of its most effectual 
work in its witty history of the drawing of a tree by 
a painter without imagination : 

" We will suppose him, for better illustration of 
the point in question, to have good feeling and correct 
knowledge of the nature of trees. He probably lays 
on his paper such a general form as he knows to be 
characteristic of the tree to be drawn, and such as he 
believes will fall in agreeably with the other masses 
of his picture. . . . When this form is set down, 
he assuredly finds it has done something he did not 
intend it to do. It has mimicked some prominent 
line, or overpowered some necessary mass. He be- 
gins pruning and changing, and, after several experi- 
ments, succeeds in obtaining a form which does no 
material mischief to any other. To this form he pro- 
ceeds to attach a trunk, and, working probably on a 
received notion or rule (for the unimaginative painter 
never works without a principle) that tree-trunks 
ought to lean first one way and then the other as they 
go up, and ought not to stand under the middle of the 
tree, he sketches a serpentine form of requisite pro- 
priety; when it has gone up far enough — that is, till 
it looks disagreeably long, he will begin to ramify it j 



42 JOHN RUSKIN 

and if there be another tree in the picture with two 
large branches, he knows that this, by all the laws of 
composition, ought to have three or four, or some 
different number ; and because he knows that if three 
or four branches start from the same point they will 
look formal, therefore he makes them start from 
points one above another; and because equal dis- 
tances are improper, therefore they shall start at un- 
equal distances. When they are fairly started, he 
knows they must undulate or go backwards and for- 
wards, which accordingly he makes them do at ran- 
dom ; and because he knows that all forms ought to 
be contrasted, he makes one bend down while the 
other three go up. The three that go up, he knows, 
must not go up without interfering with each other, 
and so he makes two of them cross. He thinks it 
also proper that there should be variety of character 
in them ; so he makes the one that bends down grace- 
ful and flexible, and, of the two that cross, he splinters 
one and makes a stump of it. He repeats the process 
among the more complicated minor boughs, until 
coming to the smallest, he thinks further care un- 
necessary, but draws them freely, and by chance. 
Having to put on the foliage, he will make it flow 
properly in the direction of the tree's growth ; he will 
make all the extremities graceful, but will be tor- 
mented by finding them come all alike, and at last 
will be obliged to spoil a number of them altogether 
in order to obtain opposition. They will not, how- 
ever, be united in this their spoliation, but will remain 
uncomfortably separate and individually ill-tempered. 
He consoles himself by the reflection that it is unnat- 
ural for all of them to be equally perfect. Now, I 
suppose that through the whole of this process he has 
been able to refer to his definite memory or concep- 
tion of nature for every one of the fragments he has 
successively added." 



" MODERN PAINTERS 43 

Ruskin's own tree-drawing — stem-drawing especially 
— has an extraordinary power ; so has his word, living 
with the life of the tree, as when he tells you of the 
lower bough stretched towards you with somewhat of 
the action of an open hand, palm upwards, and the 
fingers a little bent. 

The penetrative form of the imaginative faculty, he 
tells us, is proved in its dealing with matter and with 
spirit. It takes a grasp of things by the heart, seizes 
outward things from within, and refers them "to that 
inner secret spring of which the hold is never lost" 
by iEschylus, Homer, Dante, or Shakespeare. " How 
did Shakespeare know that Virgilia could not speak ? " 
Contemplative imagination is Shelley's faculty ; in 
painting, it presents the generic or symbolical form of 
things capable of various accidents ; and no fidelity 
of surface imitation, such as Landseer's, can atone for 
the loss of the larger relations — of light or colour, 
for example — brought about by lack of imaginative 
vision. Contemplative imagination is able, having 
climbed the sycamore, and waiting, to perceive " the 
Divine form among the mortal crowd " ; how much 
more it knows in the breaking of bread cannot be 
told. "Though we cannot, while we feel deeply, 
reason shrewdly, yet I doubt if, except when we feel 
deeply, we can ever comprehend fully." (One wishes 
it were lawful, in quoting, to leave out such a futile 
word as the " ever " in this sentence.) And the in- 
tellect is said to sit, in the hour of imagination, upon 
" its central throne." Incidentally we have this keen 
point made of one of the diff^erences of imagination 



44 JOHN RUSKIN 

and fancy : fancy is sequent and — mobile herself — 
deals with the mobility (I suppose mobility rather 
than action, wherewith imagination is mightily con- 
cerned) of things; and perhaps I may add that Keats 
judged more wisely than he knew of the rather 
common fancy occupying him for the moment when 
he wrote 

" Ever let the fancy roam ; 
Pleasure never is at home." 

Doubtless imaginative joy is everywhere supremely at 
home. "For the moment," I say — for the brief mo- 
ment; contemplative imagination is in Keats in large 
and intense perfection. 

"Ideal " and " Real " are words that represent an- 
other subject of old thought whereon most men have 
opinions. Let me say briefly (since this may now be 
said more briefly than when Ruskin said it) that the 
doctrine of Modern Painters would have us to con- 
demn that generalising which is a combination, an as- 
sembling of individual characters, and is impotent; 
and that it would have us to seek the ideal of each 
individual, by the mental study of the hieroglyphics 
of his sacred history, and by the hard working por- 
traiture, " the necessary and sterling basis of all ideal 
art," practised by Raphael, Titian, Tintoretto, Ghir- 
landajo, Masaccio, John Bellini ; and not by Guido 
or the Caracci. The lack of the individual ideal, 
with the triviality of accessories, has filled the English 
Academy " with such a school of portraiture as must 
make the people of the nineteenth century the shame 



MODERN PAINTERS 



45 



of their descendants, and the butt of all time." In 
treating of the vital and ideal beauty of man Ruskin 
says that the purity of flesh-painting depends on the 
intensity and warmth of its colour. 

The second volume, finally, is very distinctly, and 
indeed suddenly, patched with the style of Hooker, 
whom Ruskin had studied with full imitative inten- 
tion. But the normal and working style is purely of 
its own day as his genius renewed the day and the 
hour — that is, it is fresh, full-charged, and exact ; 
and as unlike anything in the past ages as it is unlike 
the more hesitating, gradated, and reinforced propriety 
learned by some later English from some later French 
writers. 



CHAPTER IV 

"modern painters" 

THE THIRD AND FOURTH VOLUMES (1856) 

The third volume w^as written after ten years. 
Turner had died too soon to receive the amends of 
the first volume for the rash blame that had embittered 
his life; and from the irreparable cruelty Ruskin's 
heart had taken the u'ound that the young heart ac- 
cepts from the world ; but there were, in their meas- 
ure, men whom it was not too late to praise, and the 
generous fear lest one or two true painters should be 
denied their due until they also had passed from the 
communion of men upon earth led Ruskin somewhat 
far in his praises of modern painters who were not 
Turners. As a prelude stands an essay " Touching 
the Grand Style," in controversy with Sir Joshua 
Reynolds and with Dr. Johnson, his ally. It is with 
no irreverence towards the master whose painting was 
a refutation of everything shallow that he took in 
hand to speak or read, and with no irreverence to 
Johnson, that a reader, fresh from the searching thought 
of Ruskin, confesses the Discourse here examined to 
be an instance of the commonplace thinking of the 
eighteenth century — commonplace (let the paradox be 
allowed) to the degree of falsity. Loose reasoning in 
exact English is here, as where Sir Joshua says that 
46 



" MODERN PAINTERS 47 

the Grand Style of Michelangiolo, "the Homer of 
painting," " has the least of common nature," whereas 
it is common and general nature that Sir Joshua's 
doctrine of the Grand Style does logically allow, and 
the distinction of individual character that it forbids. 
If the comparison with Homer were a just one, then 
the heroic or impossible in art must be mingled (as 
Ruskin proves), with the very unheroic and quite pos- 
sible, with details of cookery, amongst others ; and 
having shown the figure of his hero, the painter ought 
to " spend the greater part of his time (as Homer the 
greater number of his verses) in elaborating the pat- 
tern on his shield." Moreover Sir Joshua and the 
Doctor think they have profoundly shaken the original 
idea of beauty by the eighteenth-century device of ex- 
plaining beauty by custom : " If the whole world," 
they say, " should agree that Yes and No should 
change their meanings. Yes would then deny and No 
would affirm." As though the arbitrary sign of a 
word had any but a conventional relation to the thing 
signified ; and as though the Yes answered to the 
question " Do two and two make four ? " could be 
changed for No in its significance, even if the sound 
of it were No ! 

In regard to dignity Ruskin says : 

" Paul Veronese opposes the dwarf to the soldier, 
and the negress to the queen ; Shakespeare places 
Caliban beside Miranda and Autolycus beside Perdita; 
but the vulgar idealist withdraws his beauty to the 
safety of the saloon, and his innocence to the seclu- 
sion of the cloister, ... he has neither courage 



48 JOHN RUSKIN 

to front the monster, nor wit enough to furnish the 
knave." 

Ruskin finds the great style to be the style of a great 
painter, and knows that no good will can bring it to 
pass. The reader may remember that it is written in 
the Phado^ " There are, say those who preside at the 
mysteries, many wand-bearers, but few inspired." 

The recurrence of the dispute as to detail, if ever 
to be lamented, is hardly so in this third volume, 
wherein it produces some memorable sayings ; for 
example, that touches, seeming coarse when near the 
eye, are put on by a fine painter with the calculation 
wherewith an archer draws his bow — according to the 
distance, " the spectator seeing nothing but the strain 
of the strong arm"; and that "the best drawing in- 
volves a wonderful perception and expression f?/" indis- 
tinctness." But alas ! how shall I attain to know, in 
two pictures, the indistinctness that is merely indis- 
tinctness from that which is wonderfully perceived to 
be indistinct ? If, a little further, we must submit to 
have it said of the tender Rembrandt that he sacrifices 
to one light and its relations " the expression of every 
character . . . which depends on tenderness of 
shape or tint," we submit for the pleasure of reading, 
in contrast, of Veronese's " delicate air " and " great 
system of spacious truth." 

" He unites all . . . in tenderest balance, 
noting in each hair's-breadth of colour, not merely 
what its rightness or wrongness is in itself, but what 
its relation is . . . ; restraining, for truth's sake, 



" MODERN PAINTERS 49 

his exhaustless energy, reigning back, for truth's sake, 
his fiery strength ; veiling, before truth, the vanity of 
brightness ; penetrating, for truth, the discouragement 
of gloom." 

After the true and the false " Grand Styles " come 
considerations of true and false ideals ; and I take from 
a page on the latter this witty passage : 

" A modern German, without invention, . . . 
seeing a rapid in a river, will immediately devote 
the remainder of the day to the composition of 
dialogues between amorous water nymphs and un- 
happy mariners; while the man of true invention, 
power, and sense will, instead, set himself to consider 
whether the rocks in the river could have their points 
knocked off, or the boats upon it be made with 
stronger bottoms. . . . The various forms of 
false idealism have so entangled the modern mind, 
often called, I suppose ironically, practical." 

Compare with this the permission given, two pages 
later, to the true imagination to create for itself 
*' fairies and naiads, and other such fictitious creatures." 
How shall the reader be taught to feel, with Ruskin, 
an infallible moral indignation against this naiad and 
an infallible moral delight in that ? It seems to me 
impossible. One falls back upon the sure if inex- 
plicable private judgment : " this ideal poem is genius- 
work and beautiful, and that ideal poem is not." But 
in confessing despair of learning the lesson as a lesson 
(it is taught, with all power, purpose, and insistence, 
by Ruskin, as a lesson) I disclaim the insolence of re- 
proaching him with that moral passion which was to 



50 JOHN RUSKIN 

his mind most intelligible, most necessary, and an- 
gelically just. 

" Purist Idealism," " Naturalist Idealism," and 
" Grotesque Idealism " in their right forms are studied 
next, with some repetition, but also with almost over- 
whelming variety. Ruskin adds to his words on the 
authentic imagination these, which, when they are 
heard, confer the vision and the power: "Write the 
things which thou hast seen, and the things which 
are." To the imagination he commits the study of 
general things, of special things, and of unique things 
in their multitudes. "The choice as well as the 
vision is manifested to Homer," he says in another 
place, touching on the controversy that runs through- 
out. In a passage which has truth in a most strange 
aspect, he avers that without choice a great painter 
may paint vain and paltry things " at a sorrowful 
level, somewhat above vulgarity. It is only when the 
minor painter takes them on his easel that they be- 
come things for the universe to be ashamed of." The 
chapter on the Grotesque is altogether delightful and 
wonderful. Grotesque art is that which " arises 
from healthful but irrational play of the imagination, 
or from irregular and accidental contemplation of ter- 
rible things, or from the confusion of the imagination 
by the presence of truths which it cannot wholly 
grasp " ; in the last case it is " altogether noble." 

" How is it to be distinguished from the false and 
vicious grotesque which results from idleness instead 
of noble rest; from malice, instead of the solemn con- 
templation of the necessary evil; and from general 



MODERN PAINTERS 



51 



degradation of the human spirit, instead of its sub- 
jection, or confusion, by thoughts too high for it ? " 

Raskin admits that " the vague and foolish incon- 
sistencies of undisciphned dream " might be mistaken 
for " the compelled inconsistencies of thought "; and 
he teaches us the difference in one of the best, most 
unmistakable, most imaginative, and most conclusive 
of all the lessons in his books — that of the two griffins. 
The drawings of the Roman griffin, from the temple of 
Antoninus and Faustina, and of the Lombard griffin, 
from the Cathedral of Verona, are by his own hand. 
The " classical " griffin has technical mastery of 
composition, collocation, combination — the secondary 
qualities in no little beauty, but Ruskin takes the man 
who wrought it through the experiment and piece- 
meal of his work as but now he took a bad draughts- 
man through his tree — with exquisite dramatic sense 
of the man's mind and action, most wittily, with a wit 
of the very fingers. He shows how the lion and the 
eagle, put together, have been missed in the winged 
creature with its trivial eye, and its foot on the top of 
a flower. Let the reader remember that this griffin 
was famous, and that no one had perceived the Lom- 
bardic griffin until Ruskin studied him. No piecemeal 
is in this winged creature. " He is not merely a bit 
of lion and a bit of eagle, but whole lion incorporate 
with whole eagle." He has the carnivorous teeth, 
"and the peculiar hanging of the jaw at the back, 
which marks the flexible mouth " ; he has no cocked 
ears, like the other, to catch the wind in flight (Ruskin 



52 JOHN RUSKIN 

says that the classical griffin would have an ear-ache 
when he "got home" — a phrase of " heart-easing 
mirth ") ; he — the Lombard — has the throat, the 
strength, the indolence of the lion : " he has merely 
got a poisonous winged dragon to hold, and for such 
a little matter as that, he may as well do it lying 
down." With the utmost dramatic sense is the grasp 
on the dragon told in this fine page, to which the 
reader is bound to have recourse if he would know 
true griffinism at all. " Composing legalism does 
nothing else than err." The passionate imagination 
knows not how to transgress. 

From the chapters on " Finish " let us clearly learn 
that what Ruskin calls by this name is life — no less. 
His illustrations of Claude's and Constable's tree- 
drawing and of the real and vital growth of trees are 
to this point ; and nowhere is the extraordinary power 
of his own hand more manifest than in the plate 
"Strength of Old Pine." None but his word would 
describe his work. " The Use of Pictures " (a very 
knot of reasoning) and a brief history of the human 
spirit of the artist, antique and modern, bring us to 
the famous " Pathetic Fallacy." This fallacy is a 
fiction (wanton, fanciful, imaginative, or more purely 
passionate) in our reading of natural things according 
to the feeling of our own hearts. Obviously it is 
chiefly poetry that is here in question ; and the reader 
should understand that Ruskin is not writing of poets 
who are no poets ; he admits two orders of poets, 
but no third, as doubtless a musician would admit two 
orders of musicians — two very arts of music, two 



"MODERN PAINTERS 53 

muses — but no third ; and he places — agreeing therein 
with the greater number of critics — one order higher 
than the other, as a musician need not do in contem- 
plating his own double-peaked hill, Ruskin makes an 
admirable opposition of the image without fallacy of 
Dante to the image with fallacy of Coleridge ; paus- 
ing for a moment (only a moment, for the chapter is 
intended to treat chiefly of noble and passionate fal- 
lacy) at the fallacy which is not poetic at all because 
it is assigned, as by Pope, to the wrong passion, and 
is cold. But I confess all this reasoning on poetry 
seems to fail — not impotently, but with vital effort, 
and because of some prohibition from the beginning 
of the task — to fail to prove or even to demonstrate 
anything we do not know, or to disprove anything 
we feel. A whole chapter further on, for instance, 
shows Walter Scott to be better than a sentimentalist, 
better than a poet who works with difficulty, better 
than a poet who is self-conscious, better as a poet-seer 
than a mere poet-thinker, and moreover a thorough 
representative of his time by his love of nature, of the 
past, of colour, and of the picturesque, by his sadness 
and lack of personal faith, and so forth. But at the 
end of the argument we shall not have been persuaded 
to take Scott to be a poet possessed of the spirit of 
poetry. The essay, however, though a vain persua- 
sion, is an excellent commentary ; take the sentence, 
for example, which explains how we have pleasure in 
Kingsley's fallacious " cruel foam, " not because the 
words " fallaciously describe foam, but because they 
faithfully describe sorrow." The chapter has been 



54 JOHN RUSK.IN 

popular, for it reaches none of the inner concentra- 
tions of thought that make Modern Painters arduous 
reading to a real reader. The chapter following, on 
" Classical Landscape," deals also with poetry. To 
the question whether the modern with his fancy does 
not see something in nature that Homer could not see, 
Ruskin replies that the Greek had his own feeling — 
that of faith and not of fallacy. *■'■ He never says the 
waves rage, or the waves are idle. But he says there 
is somewhat in, and greater than, the waves, which 
rages, and is idle, and that he calls a god." Nor will 
Ruskin consent to have Homer's Hera, cuffing the 
contentious Artemis about the ears, too much inter- 
preted. Let no one think to explain away " my real, 
running, beautiful, beaten Diana, into a moon behind 
clouds." Happy too, by its phrase, in the finely 
elaborate contrast of the antique and the modern 
spirit, is this passage on the Greek and the gods : 

" To ask counsel of them, to obey them, to sacri- 
fice to them, to thank them for all good, this was 
well ; but to be utterly downcast before them, or not 
to tell them his mind in plain Greek if they seemed 
to him to be conducting themselves in an ungodly 
manner — this would not be well." 

And happy in thought is a passage on the modern 
who accepts sympathy from nature that he does not 
believe in, and gives her sympathy that he does not 
believe in (but should this part of the phrase be so 
positive as the other ?), whereas the Greek had no 
sympathy at all with " actual wave and woody fibre." 



MODERN PAINTERS 



55 



The exquisite chapter on " The Fields " traces the 
history of the landscape of vegetation, ancient and 
mediaeval, discovers the first sky in an illuminated 
manuscript and the first leaf in its borders — how it un- 
folded there ; and tracks the change in the human 
spirit in regard to the forest, wherein the man of the 
Middle Ages looked to meet with an enemy in am- 
bush or a bear, whereas the ancient " expected to meet 
one or two gods, but no banditti " ; and " The Rocks " 
is a magnificent study of mountains as man beheld 
them in the ancient world and in the altered ages. 
Ruskin gives modern man, with his love of breeze, 
of shadows, of the ruling and dividing clouds, over to 
the gibe of Aristophanes — that he would " speak in- 
geniously concerning smoke," that he disbelieves in 
Jupiter, and crowns the whirlwind. Exquisite play 
is mingled with all the philosophy of these historic 
chapters. A summary but splendid history of colour 
in the arts — a spiritual history of the colours man 
has loved — opens the question — treated at length by 
other pens long after Modern Painters was written — 
of the sense of colour in Antiquity ; and the study re- 
turns to Turner, the man who was first in the es- 
sentially modern painting of nature in place of the 
human form, as Bacon was first in the modern study 
of nature instead of the human mind. But in " The 
Moral of Landscape " Turner himself and all lovers 
of nature are arraigned with extreme austerity to justify, 
or rather to excuse, that passion for landscape where- 
with some of the greatest of human intellects have 
not been charged ; and it is only after a meditation. 



56 JOHN RUSKIN 

full of misgiving, nay, of suffering, and courage, and 
after trying all things — all human wandering, from 
that of the truant schoolboy studying nature despite 
of duty and discipline, to that of the poet, astray on 
one of the infinite ways, in one of the infinite direct- 
tions, of loss — it is only then that this teacher permits 
himself to bless the human love of nature. With 
*' trembling hope " and the profound decision that is 
to be won from the heart of hearts of a dreadful 
doubt, he calls finally upon the love and knowledge 
of landscape to mend specifically the foolish spirit of 
a century bent upon " annihilating time and space by 
steam " (as people said in 1850 — but the saying was 
confessedly mere rhetoric, and certainly a vulgar kind), 
whereas time is what wisdom would seek to gain, and 
space is full of beauty upon which wisdom would be 
glad to pause. 

The volume closes with a little history of " The 
Teachers of Turner," which compares Scott, neglected 
as a boy, with Turner, educated a little in the for- 
malism of a low degree of classical knowledge, which 
did, in fact, show the way to larger interests. Albeit 
Turner had to await his opportunity to steal from the 
Egerian wells to the Yorkshire streams, and " from 
Homeric rocks, with laurels at the top and caves at 
the bottom " to Alpine precipices carrying the pine, 
yet he gained something from the restraint, and was 
thereafter able to watch with pleasure " the staying of 
the silver fountain [the garden fountain] at its ap- 
pointed height in the sky " as well as to pore with 
delight upon the unbound river. But, ordered, as a 



"modern painters 57 

boy, to draw elevations of Renaissance buildings, and 
commissioned as a youth to draw Palladian mansions 
for their owners, Turner never loved or understood 
architecture ; whereas Scott, if he learnt little of it, 
liked it heartily. " A forced admiration of Claude 
and a fond admiration of Titian," and of all the great 
Venetian landscape, are traced by Ruskin in Turner's 
early work ; with Cuyp Turner matched himself in 
emulation, and he suffered injury from the example of 
Vandevelde. Then follow some vigorous pages about 
Claude. " Tenderness of perception and sincerity of 
purpose " Ruskin attributes to him ; and confesses 
that he it was who first set the sun in heaven. But 
Claude's way of misunderstanding " the main point " 
is proved by Ruskin in the case of JEne^s drawing 
his bow, from the Liber Veritatis. 

From the ending of this volume, which refers to the 
Crimean War, the reader should carry two phrases 
briefer and more concentrated than is usual with an 
author so bent on exposition. One is " the sunlight 
of deathbeds," and the other (on the sudden faults of 
nations) " For great, accumulated . . . cause, 
their foot slides in due time." And this is memorable 
as the note of a watcher of public things : 

" I noticed that there never came news of the ex- 
plosion of a powder-barrel . . . but the Parlia- 
ment lost confidence immediately in the justice of the 
war ; reopened the question whether we ever should 
have engaged in it, and remained in a doubtful and 
repentant state of mind until one of the enemy's 
powder-barrels blew up also." 



58 JOHN RUSKIN 

Defending himself against the not unrighteous 
charge that he not only neglected but scorned German 
philosophy, Ruskin avers, in his Appendix, that he is 
right to condemn " by specimen " : 

" He who seizes all that he plainly discerns to be 
valuable, and never is unjust but when he cannot honestly 
help it^ will soon be enviable in his possessions, and 
venerable in his equity." 

The humorous phrase takes us on many years, to 
Fiction Fair and Foul^ in the Nineteenth Century^ where 
Ruskin related his refusal to be troubled to read a 
certain novel he had heard praised; the " situation " 
of the story, they told him, was that of two people 
who had " compromised themselves in a boat " ; foul 
and foolish. Not without pain or incredulity has the 
reader to learn that the passage so ridiculed is the 
flight and the return of Maggie Tulliver. Injustice 
may be as inevitable as "stumbling or being sick," 
but evitable was the proclamation of this stray, un- 
instructed, and unjustified judgment. The pardon of 
these implicit injustices surely depends upon their 
privacy, upon the silence that is not irrevocable, and 
on the secrecy wherewith a man keeps his own counsel 
as to his prejudice. 

The volumes are less difficult reading as the work 
goes forward, and the fourth has had ten readers for 
one reader of the earlier three. Partly for this cause 
the page on the Calais tower (placed in the late edition 
at the beginning of the volume) became famous : it 
evoked what its author calls the weak enthusiasms of 



" MODERN PAINTERS 59 

those who missed the essential beauty because they 
thought themselves elected to admire the " style." It 
is a passage of a chapter directed to correct and 
chastise that popular ideal of the " picturesque " abroad 
and the " neat " at home wherewith many thousands 
go and come across the Channel. 

" The large neglect, the noble unsightliness of it ; 
the record of its years written so visibly, yet without 
sign of weakness or decay ; its stern wasteness and 
gloom, eaten away by the Channel winds, and over- 
grown by the bitter sea grasses -, its slates and tiles all 
shaken and rent, and yet not falling ; its desert of 
brickwork full of bolts, and holes, and ugly fissures, 
and yet strong, like a bare brown rock ; its careless- 
ness of what any one thinks or feels about it, putting 
forth no claim, having no beauty or desirableness, 
pride, nor grace ; yet neither asking for pity ; not, as 
ruins are, useless and piteous, feebly or fondly gar- 
rulous of better days ; but useful still, going through 
its own daily work — as some old fisherman beaten 
grey by storm, yet drawing his daily nets ; so it stands, 
with no complaint about its past youth, in blanched 
and meagre massiveness and serviceableness, gathering 
human souls together underneath it ; the sound of its 
bells for prayer still rolling through its rents ; and the 
grey peak of it seen far across the sea, principal of the 
three that rise above the waste of surfy sand and 
hillocked shore — the lighthouse for life, and the belfry 
for labour, and this for patience and praise." 

Appropriate to the time, fifty years ago, is the re- 
buke that follows of the painter who went in search 
of " fallen cottage, deserted village, blasted heath, 
mouldering castle," — ^joyful sights to him alone of 



60 JOHN RUSKIN 

mankind, so that they did but " show jagged angles of 
stone and timber " ; true, he mingled with his pleasures 
a slight tragical feeling, "a vague desire to live in 
cottages," a partly romantic, partly humble, sympathy. 
Ruskin showed him his own triviality in contrast with 
the sympathy of genius which was Turner's. Tintoret 
had a like genius, but without humour. Veronese 
had such a sympathy, but without tragedy. Rubens 
wants grace and mystery. In Turner alone Ruskin 
finds the complete sympathy ; failing only as he was 
human. From the immeasurably various opened 
world before such a genius Turner chose great things, 
not contenting himself with the personal impression 
that might make odds and ends dear to him, as 
Ruskin's young pre-Raphaelites were doing, leaving 
the noble things to be made into " vignettes for 
annuals," or to be painted vilely. Surely the surviv- 
ing slander that Ruskin would have his disciples to 
" select nothing and to neglect nothing " might have 
been silenced once for all by the note to this same 
page, which proves him to have directed none but the 
preparatory studies of young learners by that celebrated 
phrase. Nor is any controversy possible in face of 
another page of this volume : 

" If a painter has inventive power he is to treat his 
subject [by] . . . giving not the actual facts of 
it, but the impression it made on his mind." 

Ruskin supplied his future opponents with this word 
and with this thought which they brandished and 



"modern painters" 6i 

vaunted on their side of some supposed controversy. 
In truth, he allows a " great inventive landscape 
painter" to do what he likes, to give not the image, 
but the spirit of a place, to go down into a jumbled 
and formless lower valley of the Alps with his mind 
full of the terrors of a pass above ; and in that power 
of impression to transform the rdcks. But let the 
uninventive beware of the paltry work of composing ; 
let him learn to make portraits of places, and record 
for us the battlefield for the sake of strategy, the castle 
before it moulders away, the abbey before it is pulled 
to the ground, the beast before it is extinct, the 
topography of Venice before the city is destroyed ; 
that is art enough for him. But, unfortunately, he is 
not to be trusted for facts ; and Ruskin finds that the 
dull Canaletto, far from making a picture, cannot so 
much as record exactly where a house stood. If any 
one shall say, moreover, that by this or that invention 
Turner did wrong inventively, Ruskin replies, " The 
dream said not so to Turner." 

The succeeding chapters are a long lesson on the 
initial and unending difficulties of illumination, and 
of the degrees of pictorial vision, from which I must 
quote no more than this on relations or " values " : 

"Despise the earth; fix your eyes on its gloom, 
and forget its loveliness ; and we do not thank you for 
your languid or despairing perception of brightness in 
heaven. But rise up actively from the earth, — learn 
what there is in it, know its colour and form 
and if after that you can say ' heaven is bright,' it will 
be a precious truth." 



62 JOHN RUSKIN 

And this from the study of colour as more than all 
else a painter's business : 

"The student may be led into folly by philosophers, 
and into falsehood by purists ; but he is always safe if 
he holds the hand of a colourist." 

And this, on Mystery : 

" All distinct drawing must be bad drawing, and 
. . , nothing can be right till it is unintelligible. 
. . . Excellence of the highest kind, without ob- 
scurity, cannot exist." 

Assuredly, without difficulty from the objections of 
modern readers, who are convinced already, Ruskin 
controls by means of these truths his own doctrine 
of detail. It is the perception of mystery that the 
greatest of all masters have added to the perception 
of truth — Turner, Tintoret, and Paul Veronese, mys- 
terious painters, whose perception, " first as to what 
is to be done, and then of the means of doing it, is 
so colossal that I always feel in the presence of their 
pictures just as other people would in that of a super- 
natural being." The student should weigh well the 
words " perception of mystery " and all that they im- 
ply, as distinct ^rom " power of dispelling mystery " or 
any such phrase. All invention, moreover, all mys- 
tery, and all intricacy must close in a simple and nat- 
ural pictorial vision, which would be like a child's if 
it were not more comprehensive. Finally, " The 
right of being obscure is not one to be lightly 
claimed." From this point the fourth volume of 



"modern painters" 63 

Modern Painters becomes chiefly a direct study of na- 
ture, a study indescribably rich but not to be followed 
by notes and summaries. An exception there is in 
the digression on the character and conditions of the 
Valais peasantry, in " Mountain Gloom," a chapter 
full of poignant thoughts. Some fault of reasoning 
may be detected in the attribution to their religion of 
a peculiar melancholy in these people, whereas to the 
same cause a different effect must be referred amongst 
the equally unworldly countrymen of Lombardy, and 
whereas Ruskin himself, after writing with bitterness 
of this religious source of sorrow, goes on to show 
that he and they and all of us have cause enough of 
grief without it. Exquisite is the sad record of the 
work of the husbandman — without books, or thoughts, 
or attainments, or rest — at his small crops on the 
ledges of these divine mountain-sides, where " the 
meadows run in and out like inlets of lake among the 
harvested rocks, sweet with perpetual streamlets." 
The historical digression, in " Mountain Glory," 
studies the mountains in their relation to the history 
of the mind of man, as the answering aspect of man 
towards the mountains was studied in an earlier page ; 
and here again I lose the proof of the argument. 
Ruskin seems to compel the presence of the moun- 
tains to account for contrary things, rises and falls, in 
the history of Italian painting. And the accompany- 
ing inquiry as to the mountain influence upon literary 
power seems to be one of the few enterprises of this 
courageous mind that do not altogether justify them- 
selves ; but even here how much splendour of thought ! 



CHAPTER V 

"modern painters" 

the fifth volume (i860) 

The last volume of this enormous vi^ork of thought, 
imagination, sincerity, and devotion is chiefly a con- 
tinuation of the study of natural landscape, of form 
in the leaf, anatomy in the branch ; of the play of 
these creatures of earth w^ith the light from the skies, 
and the unimaginable shadows that " stumble over 
everything they come across " — a world of its own 
that of the experimental shadow ! This volume is a 
study of the whole garden : " How have we ravaged 
instead of kept it ! " and of the unalterable skies. 
The more intent the study is, the more impassioned 
— a look of adoration at arm's length, a kiss at close 
quarters. The large sense of vegetation, that unsuf- 
fering creature, with its youth, age, death perpetually 
rehearsed, grows yet more poetic when it is the little 
will of the bud to grow to a pinnacle that Ruskin 
looks into, with his incomparably lovely botany. He 
tells us of the trees that are builders with the shield, 
and of those that are builders with the sword, accord- 
ing to the manner in which they defend their buds ; 
he tells us what, measured month by month, is the 
year's work, and, by the periodicity of the life of 
vegetation itself, what is the age's ; how the young 
64 



"modern painters" 65 

leaves, " like the young bees," keep out of each 
other's way. The exquisite science of the book is 
for the service of art, for the aspect of the leaf in na- 
ture, and for the praise of the leaf-drawing of Titian 
and Holbein, and for the refutation of the leaf-draw- 
ing of Ruysdael and Hobbema. Ruskin shows us, in 
boughs, the will, fire, and fantasy of growth measured 
by the strong law of nervous life and strong law of 
material attraction, the height of a tree controlled 
by the gravitation that sinks the fall of lead. He 
shows us the whole mathematical truths of actual 
and of pictorial balance in wild asymmetric nature 
and in Turner; and the incoherence, the lack 
of equilibrium, in the dull-leaved branch of Salva- 
tor Rosa ; and how the false work lacks wit as 
well as poise. He proves to us the conditions of the 
leaf-bearing bough — harmony, obedience, distress (or 
difficulty), and happy inequality. Ruskin has said 
that he was content with himself for one thing — he 
had done justice to the pine. But he has done justice 
also to the oak, and to the poplar. Something that 
belongs to the special leaf, to the division of the twigs, 
to the definite design that by their tips all the twigs 
and branches together draw as the figure of the tree, 
something that is peculiar to the complexion of the 
leaf and to its green, and is the spirit of the woods, 
abides about the names of all trees in these pages. 

" Between the earth and man arose the leaf. Be- 
tween the heaven and man arose the cloud. His life 
being partly as the falling leaf, and partly as the fly- 
ing vapour." 



66 JOHN RUSKIN 

But the chapters on clouds here following — " Cloud 
Balancings," " Cloud Flocks," " Cloud Chariots," 
" The Angel of the Sea " — are not only scientific 
studies of clouds carried further than those in the first 
volume, and observations multiplied, but are probably 
intended to mend the former work as literature. The 
page of sixteen years before had been rather abruptly 
patched with decorated and splendid passages ; the 
page of the last volume is more glorious, the words 
are more abundant, Ruskin himself has half dis- 
owned the eloquence in the writing of the earlier 
volumes, but in truth this fifth volume outdoes all 
that had gone before. The purpose, nevertheless, is 
as severe as ever ; here, as throughout this long task 
— "the investigation of the beauty of the visible 
world " — it was always, as Ruskin says in regard to 
the reader, " accuracy I asked of him, not sympathy ; 
patience, not zeal ; apprehension, not sensation." 

The following part of this volume deals with cer- 
tain laws of art, such as that of composition, not 
fully treated elsewhere. And here again we seem to 
be cast back upon the single law of Genius. As 
Ruskin banned " every kind of falsity," yet allowed 
Rubens to make an horizon aslant with the drift of a 
stormy picture, and praised Vandyck for his grey 
roses ; so, as to composition, he tells us that no ex- 
pression, truth to nature, nor sentiment can win him 
to look at a picture twice if it is ill composed, yet the 
composition cannot be prescribed by law ; it is to be 
as a great painter makes it. The reader will, of 
course, understand that " composition " in this chap- 



" MODERN PAINTERS " 67 

ter and " composition " in the great chapters on the 
" Faculties of the Imagination " must be taken with 
separate meanings ; in the latter case a false compo- 
sition is implied. Ruskin has, needless to say, studied 
the true composition of his great painters as deeply 
as their other qualities, and he gives a technical lesson 
thereon in " The Law of Help," starting from the 
contrast of the decomposition which is death and the 
composition which is natural life, and showing true 
pictorial composition to be coherence, unity, and vi- 
tality itself. 

*' In true composition, everything not only helps 
everything else a little^ but helps with its utmost 
power. . . . Not a line, not a spark of colour, 
but is doing its very best." 

And this should correct the doubts of those who have 
repeated that Ruskin teaches finish to be " an added 
truth." He never meant thereby a piecemeal truth ; 
for what is added in a fine picture is added, he tells 
us in this chapter, inevitably and in unity ; and even 
when he represents a true artist asking himself where, 
in his picture, he can " crowd in " another detail, an- 
other thought, to think this to be an afterthought or a 
later detail would be to misinterpret Ruskin's whole 
body of teaching. Inferior artists, he says, are afraid 
of finish not because they have unity, but because 
they have it not. Nor have they the deed^ which is 
the act of purpose. The greatest deed is creation, 
and the creation of life. In " The Law of Perfect- 
ness " we have the fruit of an additional study of 



68 JOHN RUSKIN 

Titian — " the winter was spent mainly in trying to 
get at the mind of Titian " — especially in his execu- 
tion of colour; that is, the ground, the working in, 
the striking over of colours. "The Dark Mirror" 
sums up the four landscape orders of Europe : Heroic 
(Titian) ; Classical (Nicolo Poussin) ; Pastoral (Cuyp) ; 
Contemplative (Turner) ; and two spurious forms : 
Picturesque and Hybrid. The reader has to resign 
himself to the banishment from Ruskin's thought of 
all the great French landscape. Once or twice he 
names French modern work with horror as something 
deathly ; but what he knows, if anything, of the 
young Corot, for example, or of Millet, one cannot 
so much as conjecture. For Venetian art he claims 
a share of the Greek spirit which is able to look with- 
out shrinking into the darkness, unentangled in the 
melancholy war of the northern souls of Holbein 
and Diirer, unconquered by the evil that not only en-' 
tangled but possessed Salvator. Therefore one chap- 
ter is called " The Lance of Pallas " and the other 
" The Wings of the Lion," and both deal with the 
race and character of Titian. A courageous "but 
not very hopeful or cheerful faith " (and this, in spite 
of the gaiety of interest which is Mr. Meredith's, 
might be a phrase of this last-named master's teach- 
ing) is that which is " rewarded by clear practical 
success and splendid intellectual power." And this 
was in the highest degree Shakespeare's ; for although 
"at the close of Shakespeare's tragedy nothing re- 
mains but dead march and clothes of burial," yet he 
was able to endure that close. It was also that of the 



" MODERN PAINTERS " 69 

Greek tragedy, with this difference in the sorrow — 
that it is connected with sin by the Greek and not by 
Shakespeare ; and this difference in the close — that 
with the Greek there is a promise of divine triumph 
and rising again. Serene is Homer's spirit, with an 
added cheerfulness of his own, and practical hope in 
present things. 

" The gods have given us at least this glorious body 
and this righteous conscience." 

Therefrom came conquest ; and the destroying, op- 
pressing, slaying, and betraying gods turned kind ; 
Artemis guarded their flocks, and Phoebus, " lord of 
the three great spirits of life — Care, Memory, and 
Melody — " turned healer. Ruskin shows us the Ve- 
netians also courageous, but a little sadder on the sur- 
face, a little less serious beneath, having arisen from, 
and partly rejected, asceticism. Seizing truth of col- 
our as only he can, he makes us understand much by 
telling us that they sunburn all their hermits to a 
splendid brown. And he tells us of the dealings of 
the sea with this people that despised agriculture and 
had no gardens, but a " perpetual May " of the wa- 
ters. Nay, not a perpetual May ; we may join issue 
with Ruskin as to the seasons of the sea. Did even 
he, who knew better than to follow the fashion, and 
who went to the Alps when the gentians were blue — 
did even he not know the May that kindles the Adri- 
atic and is not perpetual, or it would not be May ? 
But how exquisitely is this written of the Venetian 



•JO JOHN RUSKIN 

citizen, with its allusions to certain Greeks — to Anac- 
reon, to Aristophanes, and to Hippias Major : 

" No swallow chattered at his window, nor, nestled 
under.his golden roofs, claimed the sacredness of his 
mercy ; no Pythagorean fowl taught him the blessings 
of the poor, nor did the grave spirit of poverty rise at 
his side to set forth the delicate grace and honour of 
lowly life. No humble thoughts of grasshopper sire 
had he, like the Athenian; no gratitude for gifts of 
olive ; no childish care for figs, any more than thistles." 

As usual Ruskin betakes himself to the religion of 
the Venetians ; the most he knows of it was told him 
in the nursery at Heme Hill; submitting to this, and 
to the cruel passing-over, as something non-existent, 
of the enormous work of one faculty of religion — 
Compassion — that changed the face of nations, we 
shall hear in this chapter great things, nobly said, about 
the Venetian soul of man. It is a pity that half a 
page of refutation should be wasted in condescension 
to so vulgar an English modern opinion as that the 
Venetian lord painted on his knees was a hypocrite. 
But the worldly end of this religious art and majestic 
intellect (Titian was not less religious than Tintoret, 
but " the religion of Titian is like that of Shakespeare 
— occult behind his magnificent equity") came to 
pass and is accounted for by Ruskin after his own 
subtle way : 

" In its roots of power and modes of work ; in its 
belief, its breadth, and its judgment, I find the Venetian 
mind perfect ; . . . wholly noble in its sources, 
it was wholly unworthy in its purposes." 



"MODERN PAINTERS J I 

The Venetian believed in the religion, but " he de- 
sired the delight." It is difficult to the reader thus 
to divide source from purpose. When Ruskin says 
that Titian painted the Assumption " because " he 
"enjoyed rich masses of red and blue, and faces 
flushed with sunlight," I confess I need to be told 
that this " because " refers to purpose and not to 
source. Is there not, finally, something omitted in 
this history of Venetian art as also in the histories of 
Florentine, and of Greek, and of Northern, and of 
French, and of Lombard, and of all arts whereof 
Ruskin has written the vicissitudes — and is not this 
the law of movement and of alteration ? He goes far, 
goes deep, goes close, to explain the inevitable change 
which comes about perhaps through no action that 
man can know by searching or can arrest for an hour. 
The following chapter, " Diirer and Salvator," is 
upon art reconciled to sorrow, and upon the " Resur- 
rection of Death " of the sixteenth and seventeenth 
centuries. First of Salvator Rosa, " the condemned 
Salvator," the bearer of the last signs of the spiritual 
life in the art of Europe, who named himself " Despiser 
of wealth and of death." "Two grand scorns," says 
Ruskin, but " the question is not for man what he 
can scorn but what he can love." Diirer, on the 
other hand, was quiet, riding in fortitude with Death, 
like his own Knight. Claude and Gaspar Poussin, 
" classical," but incapable of the Greek or the Roman 
spirit, renounced the labour and sorrow whereto man 
is born and so became ornamental, renounced the 
pursuit of wealth and so became pastoral and pretended 



72 JOHN RUSKIN 

to Study nature ; they made selections from amongst 
the gods. In their works " Minerva rarely presents 
herself, except to be insulted by the judgment of 
Paris." And in this chapter occurs the last elaborate 
passage on Claude, the man of " fine feeling for 
beauty of form and considerable tenderness of percep- 
tion," whose " aerial effects are unrivalled," and 
whose seas are " the most beautiful in old art " ; but 
who was an artist without passion. For its humour I 
must quote the description of Claude's " St. George 
and the Dragon " : 

*' A beautiful opening in woods by a river side •, a 
pleasant fountain . . . and rich vegetation. 
. . . The dragon is about the size of ten bramble 
leaves, and is being killed by the remains of a lance 
. . . in his throat, curling his tail in a highly of- 
fensive and threatening manner. St. George, not- 
withstanding, on a prancing horse, brandishes his 
sword, at about thirty yards' distance from the offen- 
sive animal. A semicircular shelf of rocks encircles 
the foreground, by which the theatre of action is di- 
vided into pit and boxes. Some women and children 
having descended unadvisedly into the pit are helping 
each other out of it again. ... A prudent per- 
son of rank has taken a front seat in the boxes, 
crosses his legs, leans his head on his hand; 
two attendants stand in graceful attitudes behind him, 
and two more walk away under the trees, conversing 
on general subjects." 

As to Claude's "Worship of the Golden Calf," 
" in order better to express the desert of Sinai, the 
river is much larger, and the vegetation softer. Two 



"modern painters 73 

people, uninterested in idolatrous ceremonies, are 
rowing in a pleasure-boat on the river." Poussin's 
"strong but degraded mind" is the subject of graver 
phrases ; all he does well has been better done by 
Titian ; he also in his manner is condemned for lack of 
passion. The pastoral landscape, more properly so- 
called — Cuyp and Teniers the type of its painters — 
was lower yet, destitute not of spiritual character 
only, but of spiritual thought. Cuyp can paint sun- 
light, but paints unthoughtfully. " Nothing happens 
in his pictures, except some indifferent person's ask- 
ing the way of somebody else, who, by his cast of 
countenance, seems not likely to know it." Paul 
Potter " does not care even for sheep, but only for 
wool." 

" Titian could have put issues of life and death into 
the face of a man asking his way ; nay, into the back 
of him. . . . He has put a whole scheme of 
dogmatic theology into a row of bishops' backs at the 
Louvre. And for dogs, Velasquez has made some of 
them nearly as grand as his surly Kings." 

It is in the same chapter that Ruskin speaks of the 
trivial sentiment and caricature of Landseer, who 
"gave up the true nature of the animal" for the sake 
of a jest. And by this mature judgment the reader 
should correct a passage of praise in an earlier volume. 
In the chapter that contrasts Wouvermans and 
Angelico, Ruskin tells us how he finds it impossible 
to " lay hold of the temper " of some of the Dutch 
painters, workmanlike though they are. Wouvermans 



74 JOHN RUSKIN 

and Berghem are amongst the masters of the " hybrid 
landscape," intended to combine the attractions of the 
other schools, but they have a " clay-cold, ice-cold 
incapacity of understanding what pleasure meant." 
Music, dancing, hunting, boating, fishing, bathing, 
and child-play are sprinkled in a picture of Wouver- 
mans, but the fishing and bathing go on close together ; 
no one turns to look at the hunting ; hart and hind gallop 
across the middle of the river touching bottom, but 
a man dives at the edge where it is deep ; the dancing 
has no spring ; the buildings are part ruin, part villa. 
Ruskin holds this paralysis of dramatic invention to 
be the consequence of the desire to please sensual 
patrons by offering them " inventoried articles of 
pleasure." " Unredeemed carnal appetite " seems to 
the reader a somewhat violent sentence for this cold 
incontinence of incident, this trifling of convention, 
but Ruskin has never allowed trifling to be a trifle, 
whether in art or in life. The study of Angelico, 
master of the Purist school (" I have guarded my 
readers from over-estimating that school ") opposes 
spirituality to this luxury about which the reader has 
perhaps his doubts. As for Angelico, a dramatic or 
imaginative movement of some embracing angel 
amongst his groups seems to me to save him, barely, 
from weakness ; and it is doubtful whether we may 
name any weak thing as typically spiritual. 

Ruskin goes back to Turner in the chapter called 
" The Two Boyhoods," which paints the Venice of 
the young Giorgione, and the Maiden Lane, the 
Chelsea, the Covent Garden, and Thames side of the 



MODERN PAINTERS 



75 



London child. The description of Venice is some- 
what too 'gorgeous. It is hardly possible for any one 
who knows Italy to imagine her at any time all ala- 
baster, bronze, and marble, splendidly draped. But 
like this untempered Venice of fancy is Ruskin's page. 
It is one of the beautiful passages that I do not ex- 
tract, marking only with pleasure the quiet phrase that 
explains how no weak walls, low-roofed cottage, or 
straw-built shed could be built over those " tremulous 
streets." Turner's only drawing of an English clergy- 
man is excellently described, and Turner in the fogs. 
Turner among the ships. Turner in the outer ways 
of the trampled market. Ever after, his foregrounds 
had *' a succulent cluster or two of green-grocery at 
the corners." But the England of his day did graver 
things to him even than the nurturing of this great 
childhood in squalor. Ruskin gives us the exposition 
of the first picture painted by Turner with his whole 
strength — the Garden of the Hesperides of 1806, as 
a great religious picture of that opening century, and 
its religion the triumph of the dragon of Mammon or 
Covetousness, sleepless, human-voiced, il gran nemico 
of Dante, set by Turner in a paradise of smoke, con- 
ceived by the painter's imaginative intellect as iron- 
hearted, with a true bony contour, organic, but like a 
glacier. And as an earlier chapter had ended : 
" This " (the labour, that is, of Albert Diirer), " is 
indeed the labour which is crowned with laurel and 
has the wings of the eagle. It was reserved for an- 
other country to prove . . . the labour which is 
crowned with fire and has the wings of the bat " ; so 



76 JOHN RUSKIN 

this sad chapter on the " Nereid's Guard " closes with 
the fulfilment of the menace ; the " other country " 
and the other age were Turner's. Ruskin's beloved 
painter was also, like Salvator himself, in part over- 
come of evil. And when he fought his way to nature 
and the skies, painting sun-colour as Claude and Cuyp 
had painted but sunshine^ the world not only rejected 
but reviled him. " One fair dawn or sunset obedi- 
ently beheld " would have set it right, and justified his 
painting of the coloured Apollo. His critics shouted, 
" Perish Apollo. Bring us back Python." " And 
Python came," adds Ruskin, " came literally as well 
as spiritually ; all the perfect beauty and conquest 
which Turner wrought is already withered." This 
refers to the destruction that has come so soon upon 
the very material of Turner's work — wrecked, faded, 
and defiled, yet even so better than any other land- 
scape painting unmarred. 

No man, before Turner, had painted clouds scarlet. 
" Hesperid JEgle and Erytheia [the blushing one] fade 
into the twilights of four thousand years unconfessed." 
And in this new page on the great subject of colour 
Ruskin teaches us that albeit form is of incalculably 
greater importance, an error in colour is graver than 
an error in form, because of relation ; the form be- 
longs to the thing it defines, the colour to the thing 
and to all about it ; to deal falsely with the colour 
" breaks the harmony of the day." I do not know a 
more luminous thought on colour than this, even in 
these shining pages. Few have been the supreme 
colourists : Titian, Giorgione, Veronese, Tintoret, 



"MODERN PAINTERS 77 

Correggio, Reynolds, and Turner, as Ruskin counts 
them — seven ; whereas of the other qualities or powers 
of art the great masters have been many. 

Under the title of " Peace " the last great chapter 
of this great work closes, not peacefully, but with 
passionate grief. Turner had been dead nearly twenty 
years, but the cruelty of the " criticism " that had 
made his life lonely and painful had never ceased to 
wound his friend. 

" There never was yet . . . isolation of a great 
spirit so utterly desolate. . . . My own admira- 
tion was wild in enthusiasm, but it gave him no ray 
of pleasure ; he could not make me at that time under- 
stand his main meanings ; he loved me, but cared 
nothing for what I said, and was always trying to 
hinder me from writing, because it gave pain to 
his fellow-artists. . . . To censure Turner was 
acutely sensitive. . . . He knew that however 
little his higher power could be seen, he had at least 
done as much as ought to have saved him from wan- 
ton insult, and the attacks upon him in his later years 
were to him not merely contemptible in their igno- 
rance, but amazing in their ingratitude." 

Let the reader bear in mind that it is was precisely in 
the first year that showed a Royal Academy without 
any pictures of Turner's that the " Times " had learnt 
to call them " works of inspiration." It is charac- 
teristic of Ruskin that he cannot take the customary 
comfort and say that Turner learnt in the sorrow he 
underwent what he had not learnt in the joy he missed ; 
the last pages of Modern Painters protest against 



yS JOHN RUSKIN 

this form of commonplace. They utter, finally, one 
of many menaces against a world intent upon gain, 
and negligent of art and nature. Men in England 
had learnt, say these mournful closing sentences, not 
to say in their hearts " There is no God," but to say 
aloud, "There is a foolish God" ; " His orders will 
not work " ; " Faith, generosity, honesty, zeal, and 
self-sacrifice are poetical phrases " ; and " The power 
of man is only power of prey : otherwise than the 
spider, he cannot design ; otherwise than the tiger, he 
cannot feed." 



CHAPTER VI 

"the seven lamps of architecture" (1849) 

This was the first illustrated book published by Rus- 
kin. The illustrated volumes of Modern Painters 
followed it closely with their splendid cloud and tree 
drawing. In the Seven Lamps the etchings are of 
course architectural, but they are etchings of a living 
stone. A vitality of construction, of time, of shadow 
and light, and of the power and weight of stone are in 
these plates, overbitten and not altogether technically 
successful as they are ; I speak of those of the first 
edition, afterwards withdrawn. Ruskin made his draw- 
ings from windows, lofts and ladders, holding on as he 
might, and bit the plates hurriedly on his journey 
home. 

The book was an incident of the third volume of 
Modern Painters — a pause upon the topic of archi- 
tecture, but a pause as it were in haste and full of 
some of the most intent and urgent labour of John Rus- 
kin's life. There was no need for despatch when 
primroses were to be outlined, or when a lax, random 
weaving of grasses grown to the flower in June was 
to be woven again with a delicate pencil : for another 
year would make amends for any possible lapse of 
purpose or interruption of work, yielding new flowers 
to take the place of the old. A student of vegetation 

79 



80 JOHN RUSKIN 

may " wake, and learn the world, and sleep again," 
not lying in wait for changes, but confident of that 
repetition which makes nature old and mystical to 
memory, and of that renewal which makes her young 
and simple to hope — a mother to the spirit and a child 
to the eye. The painter of mountains will not be de- 
frauded by years of the ancient line upon the sky. 
The linked memories of all generations are not long 
enough, in all, to outwatch and to record a change in 
a little hill. He may be blind, or mad, or absent, but 
the shape of a bay will await his light, his reason, or 
his return. Not so with the student of ancient build- 
ings, who would arrest the action of time, and who 
therefore must make his own hour of labour elastic 
with application and with vigilance ; albeit mere time, 
Ruskin tells us, unbuilds so slowly that if men took 
pains, they might repair his action — not by the futile 
effort of " restoration " but by honest proppings and 
shorings that should confess their own date and pur- 
pose and make no confusions in the history of con- 
struction. It is not the unbuilding of time, therefore, 
that presses the student, but the destruction wrought 
with violence by man, contemptuous and impatient of 
theworkof the past, or confident that he can do some- 
thing better with the stones unset and set up in an- 
other fashion. Ruskin was obliged to delay the third 
volume of Modern Painters while he made his draw- 
ings of that which no eye should see and no hand 
should copy again. A note to the preface of The 
Seven Lamps tells us that the writer's " whole time has 
been lately occupied in taking drawings from one side 



"THE SEVEN LAMPS OF ARCHITECTURE »I 

of buildings, of which the masons were knocking 
down the other." 

The book, taking its place as an interlude in what 
was the continuous work of the young " Graduate of 
Oxford," takes its place also as a book definite in 
motive, justified by the unity of the matter, the re- 
sponsibility of the purpose, and the fulness of prepara- 
tion — the conscience and conviction need hardly be 
named ; but The Seven Lamps of Architecture is, more 
than some of its followers, one book from beginning 
to end. It has the unity of abundant matter, — the 
unity, that is, which need not break boundaries al- 
though it stretches and enlarges them with fulness, 
but holds together, amply, easily, containing with 
patience the urgence of a throng of thoughts. And 
the subject has its own unity of time, inasmuch as 
the dominating centre of the book is the work of a 
certain half-century. 

We shall find nothing more characteristic of Ruskin 
than this incident of the fifty years in question. Let 
me describe them, though roughly enough, to the 
reader, by means of Ruskin's own discovery that they 
were the years in which the stonemason, setting his 
work of Gothic tracery between man and the heavens, 
thought equally of the form of the light he revealed 
by his window and of the form of the stone whereby he 
revealed it. The eyes of that stonemason's father 
had been chiefly intent upon the opening, the star; 
the form of it had been in his fancy ; and in the men- 
tal councils of invention the shape of this exterior 
light, as his work was about to define it, had been the 



82 JOHN RUSKIN 

president image. The son of that stonemason, on the 
other hand — the half-century being past — thought in 
the foremost place of the shape of his beautiful stone ; 
beautiful it was, but not more beautiful than his whose 
fortune it was to live in the great half-century, and 
whose act it was to do the work that made the half- 
century great. This latter — the stone-sculptor of the 
fifty years here set jn the midst — designing a star of 
sky and designing the starred stone with the dignity 
of equal invention, made the window that is mani- 
festly the noblest. Ruskin, with singular sight and 
singular insight, perceives the manner, the cause, the 
past, the future, and the value of that window and 
gives it an historical place and sanction. There is no 
child that does not lie staring at the wall and fancy- 
ing that a wall-paper design seems now to take the 
shape enclosed by lines and anon the shape of the in- 
tervals instead ; and Ruskin's eye saw the tracery 
simply, impartially, and without preoccupation, like a 
child's and saw it with the mason's eye moreover, and 
with the discerning spirit of a master of theory. The 
reader might be tempted to urge this incident beyond 
its proper significance as an architectural or historical 
discovery but he can hardly be wrong in appreciating 
the passage for its authorship — authorship, that is, and 
all that it implies of character, nature, and special and 
manifold fitness for the work of the book. 

To proceed to the expository task. 

The Seven Lamps of Architecture are: The Lamp 
of Sacrifice ; The Lamp of Truth ; The Lamp of 
Power; The Lamp of Beauty; The Lamp of Life; 



"the seven lamps of architecture" 83 

The Lamp of Memory ; The Lamp of Obedience. 
On the cloth-cover of the original edition, designed by 
Ruskin after the arabesques of the pavement of San 
Miniato, above Florence — foliage, birds, and beasts 
arranged by counter-change — are embossed seven 
other words of kindred meaning : Religio ; Observ- 
antia; Auctoritas ; Fides; Obedientia; Memoria; 
Spiritus. The volume is divided into unequal chap- 
ters, headed with the English titles already stated. 
The first has in greatest measure the signs of the 
author's yet unmitigated youth. It is not so much 
the work of an untamed spirit as that of a spirit wear- 
ing certain bonds with all its will, a thousand times 
convinced, and that from the first infancy. There is 
the tone of a man troubled to convey his indignation 
by terms adequate, in the passage wherein he threatens 
the English nation with sensible visitation of divine 
wrath upon her honour, her commerce, and her arts 
as a retribution for the measure whereby a place in 
her legislature had been " impiously conceded to 
the Romanist." All this was not only disclaimed but 
unsaid in succeeding editions. Childhood with its 
passions — the polemic passion of a spiritual and intel- 
lectual home-boy is one of the most tumultuous of 
fresh passions — was still in a sense in Ruskin's heart 
during the writing of The Seven Lamps. In some 
things he made, as we shall hear him tell later in Fors 
Clavigera., a definite change ; he, for one, could not 
live under the stress of doctrines that obliged and ad- 
mitted of no transaction, and yet actually suffered 
daily transaction at the hands of their professors. He 



84 JOHN RUSKIN 

had thought every moment committed to crime that 
was not spent in rescuing men from eternal reproba- 
tion; the choice was now thrust upon him: should 
he devote his years and moments directly, theologic- 
ally, and immediately, or should he mitigate his con- 
viction of the instant stress of obligation ? How he 
answered the question may be judged from the fact 
that he addressed himself to the mediate work of art. 

"The Lamp of Sacrifice " needs not from a com- 
mentator to-day the definition that was due when The 
Seven Lamps was written. Manifestly, this author's 
works have both enriched the minds of Englishmen 
with ideas and have accustomed them to the appre- 
hension of ideas. What he has thought and pro- 
nounced abides with us, as it were, both in mechan- 
ical suspension and in chemical solution. He has 
charged us with his teachings, and has modified our 
intelligence. Thus, many of his pages seem now to 
be over-anxiously expository that were not so when 
he composed them. In this matter he stands between 
the old age and the new. Briefly, he suggests in this 
chapter a delicate distinction between sacrifice and 
waste ; between that work upon partially concealed 
ornament, which is the continuation of visible orna- 
ment, and thus justifies the surmise of the eye and 
keeps a promise, and work bestowed carelessly or 
with ignorance as to how to " make it tell," or- with 
heartless contempt of the value of human effort. This 
last is the subject of a " nice balance." From art that 
is purely wasted on the one hand, and from art (or art 
so-called) that is purely exhibitory, on the other, the 



"the seven lamps of architecture" 85 

right spirit of sacrifice is absent. Hard work is ap- 
proved — " all old work nearly has been hard work." 

As usual, the examples are exceedingly interesting. 
We are taught to respect the economy of the bas-re- 
liefs of San Zeno at Verona, with their rich work well 
in sight, and the simplicity of the still lovely work of 
the arcade above, the various distances being treated 
not by a difference in degree of beauty in decoration, 
but by a difference in the quality of design. And so 
forth with a series of instances that yield all their 
significance to the sight and insight of Ruskin's intel- 
lectual eyes. It follows from this doctrine of sacrifice 
that rich ornament (the natural flower of Gothic) is 
praised with an ardour by which a reader to-day may 
be slow to be enkindled ; he has, without intending 
it, perhaps gradually grown to love simplicity, albeit 
conscious that it is vulgar ornament and not fine that 
has made plain masonry to seem so attractive. But 
under Ruskin's teaching this tendency must be cor- 
rected, and in fact sacrificed. Many a modern man 
finds a charm in a blank strong wall that he knows is 
more than any negative merit ought to have for him. 
Such simplicities, he has to learn, 

" Are but the rests and monotones of the art ; it is 
to its far happier, far higher, exuhation that we owe 
those fair fronts of variegated mosaic, charged with 
wild fancies and dark hosts of imagery, thicker and 
quainter than ever filled the depth of midsummer 
dream ; those vaulted gates, trellised with close leaves ; 
these window-labyrinths of twisted tracery and starry 
light ; those misty masses of multitudinous pinnacle 



86 JOHN RUSKIN 

and diademed tower ; the only witnesses, perhaps, that 
remain to us of the faith and fear of nations. All else 
for which the builders sacrificed has passed away — all 
their living interest, and aims, and achievements. We 
know not for what they laboured, and we see no 
evidence of their reward. Victory, wealth, authority, 
happiness — all have departed, though bought by many 
a bitter sacrifice. But of them, and their life and 
their toil upon the earth, one reward, one evidence, is 
left to us in those grey heaps of deep-wrought stone. 
They have taken with them to the grave their 
powers, their honours, and their errors ; but they have 
left us their adoration." 



This splendid passage is itself a Gothic architecture 
of style. It closes the section of " The Lamp of 
Sacrifice." The second chapter opens with a page of 
even higher beauty, in honour of the authority of 
Truth, the terrible virtue that has no borderland (so 
Ruskin was doubtless taught in his childhood ; and so 
he teaches with his manly voice, thunderous). But 
who that has dealt, unprejudiced, with the common 
matters of the conscience will be able to cry assent to 
such a doctrine ? Can the angler who deceives a fish, 
or the physician who deceives a lunatic, dare to aver 
with Ruskin that " Truth regards with the same 
severity the lightest and the boldest violations of its 
law " ; that it is the one quality " of which there are 
no degrees " ; that whereas " there are some faults 
slight in the sight of love, some errors slight in the 
estimate of wisdom, truth forgives no insult, and en- 
dures no stain " ? Assuredly by no such rhetoric is 
this one virtue to be separated from the rest — her 



"THE SEVEN LAMPS OF ARCHITECTURE" 87 

proper company — who share with her their own in- 
evitable difficulty and doubt. But it is not to be 
wondered at that having said so much Ruskin should 
find it necessary to reassure his readers against any 
possible scruple as to the lawfulness of making art look 
like nature. This, however, as a scruple of the moral 
conscience, need not detain us. Incidentally to the 
same subject he does not abate of his estimate of Eng- 
land as " a nation distinguished for its general upright- 
ness and faith," although the English " admit into their 
architecture more of prudence, concealment, and de- 
ceit than any other [people] of this or of past time." 
Much more significance, by the way, had on a former 
page been attributed to the poor " exhibitory " shams 
of the modern Italians ; the English fault is arbitrarily 
treated as an inconsistency, the Italian, equally arbi- 
trarily, as a consistency quick with essential impli- 
cations. Quite removed from these provocations to 
controversy, and easily detachable from the ethical 
question so insistently discussed, is a passage of 
characteristic beauty descriptive of the imaginative il- 
lusion of the cupola of Parma, where Correggio has 
made a space of some thirty feet diameter "look like a 
cloud-wrapt opening in the seventh heaven, crowded 
with a rushing sea of angels." Ruskin mitigated his 
admiration of Correggio in after years. A little later 
comes the page on tracery, on one salient passage 
whereof I have already dwelt; and here is another ex- 
quisite example of this incomparably sensitive per- 
ception. The tracery of the later French Gothic 
window had grown exceedingly delicate; severe and 



88 JOHN RUSKIN 

pure it was still, nevertheless, and the material man- 
ifestly stiff. Yet — 

"At the close of the period of pause, the first sign 
of serious change was like a low breeze, passing 
through the emaciated tracery, and making it tremble. 
It began to undulate like the threads of a cobweb lifted 
by the wind. It lost its essence as a structure of 
stone. . . . The architect was pleased with this 
new fancy. . . . In a little time the bars of 
tracery were caused to appear to the eye as if they had 
been woven together like a net." 

Of chief importance in the chapter dedicated to 
"The Lamp of Power" is Ruskin's teaching upon 
the value and weight of shadows. He bids the young 
architect learn the habit of thinking in shadow : " Let 
him design with the sense of heat and cold upon him ; 
let him cut out the shadows, as men dig wells in un- 
watered plains." Let him see that the light " is bold 
enough not to be dried up by twilight, " and the 
shadow " deep enough not to be dried like a shallow 
pool by a noon-day sun." Magnificent image ! An- 
other example of power, intellectually apprehended 
with a historian's philosophy, is in Ruskin's study of 
that Gothic of rejection, the Venetian, which began 
in the luxuriance wherein other architectures have ex- 
pired, which laid aside Byzantine ornaments one by 
one, fixed its own forms " by laws more and more 
severe," and " stood forth, at last, a model of domestic 
Gothic, so grand, so complete, so nobly systematised, 
that, to my mind, there never existed an architecture 
with so stern a claim to our reverence." This judg- 



"the seven lamps of architecture" 89 

ment also was partly renounced afterwards in favour 
of early Lombard work. 

Two distinct characters in architecture had been 
treated in the earlier chapters (with what complex 
consistency of teaching, what abundance of thought, 
and what experimental examples, this mere indication 
of the subject and direction of the work does not 
pretend to express) : the one, the impression archi- 
tecture receives from human power ; the other, the 
image it bears of the natural creation. And it is this 
likeness to the "natural creation" that is the subject 
of the fourth chapter, " The Lamp of Beauty." 
The sanction of all the beauty of art, its authority, 
its appeal, its origin, its paragon, abide, as all readers 
of Ruskin have been told by him in a hundred places, 
in natural fact. " Beyond a certain point, and that a 
very low one, man cannot advance in the invention 
of beauty, without directly imitating natural form." 
Furthermore, the frequency of a form in nature is, in 
a sense carefully understood, the measure of its 
beauty. In other words, that which is, in its order 
and place, frequent, easily visible, very manifest, not 
subject to the concealing counsels of nature in organic 
and inorganic depths — caverns or living anatomy — 
that is most natural and most beautiful, and the model 
of decorative art. " By frequency I mean that lim- 
ited and isolated frequency which is characteristic of 
all perfection . . . as a rose is a common flower, 
but yet there are not so many roses on a tree as there 
are leaves." Throughout the argument the teacher 
has searched out his way sometimes by quick, some- 



go JOHN RUSKIN 

times by hard, thinking : but never in haste, and 
never suppressing any part or step of the sincere proc- 
esses of thought. And immediately upon this eager 
but steady inquiry into the sanction of artistic beauty 
comes the passage that surprised the world, in con- 
demnation of the Greek fret ; and with it one of 
those keen discoveries that make Ruskin's research so 
brilliant — the discovery that there is a likeness to 
natural form in the fret, for it is an image of the 
crystals of bismuth ; but that this crystallisation is 
seldom visible, little known, and not even perfectly 
natural, inasmuch it is brought to pass by artificial 
means, the mental being seldom or never found in 
pure condition. But the crystals of salt have a form 
known to almost every man, and it is the crytallisa- 
tion of common salt that sets the example of another 
design in right lines used throughout the Lombard 
churches and drawn with extraordinary beauty by the- 
author, rich with shadow. As a result of the same 
kind of casuistic insight (I put the word casuistic to 
its right use) Ruskin condemns the portcullis and all 
heraldic decoration — especially when, as usual, it is 
repeated. The arms are an announcement, and have 
their place, but what they have to tell it is an imperti- 
nence to tell a score of times. Nor is a motto deco- 
rative, " since, of all things unlike nature, the forms 
of letters are perhaps the most so." With the same 
sincere ingenuity (here quite unstrained) he explains 
the vileness of the ribbon and its unlikeness to grass 
and sea-weed with their anatomy, gradation, direction, 
and allotted size of separate creatures. The ribbon 



"the seven lamps of architecture" 91 

has " no strength, no languor. It cannot wave, in 
the true sense, but only flutter; it cannot bend, but 
only turn and be wrinkled." We are urged to con- 
demn the ribbons of Raphael, and do so heartily, 
even the ribbons that tie " Ghiberti's glorious bronze 
flowers," and all the multitudes of scrolls in so far as 
they are used for decoration. Let me add this ex- 
quisite phrase (from a somewhat paradoxical passage) 
in description of that Mediaeval treatment of drapery 
which began to restore, while it altered, the Antique 
buoyancy : " The motion of the figure only bent 
into a softer line the stillness of the falling veil, fol- 
lowed by it like a slow cloud by drooping rain : only 
in links of lighter undulation it followed the dances 
of the angels." 

The warning against false decorations is necessarily 
a warning also against decoration misplaced. It was 
spoken in 1849. Fifty years later and more, the 
world has become full of violations. Nothing spoken 
by this voice, which spoke after close thought and 
with singular authority, has been disobeyed with a 
more general and more national consent. Ruskin 
pronounced the law that " things belonging to pur- 
poses of active and occupied life " should not be dec- 
orated. The answer of the public is the Greek 
moulding on shop-fronts, the decoration of the tem- 
ple multiplied in the railway-station, on the counter, 
in the office ; until for disgust we no longer see it, 
and are but aware of some superfluity that is depress- 
ing, degraded, vulgar, dishonouring, and tedious — we 
care not what. The country has treated with prac- 



92 JOHN RUSKIN 

tical contempt the humorous and generous instructor 
who in his youth would have much enjoyed " going 
through the streets of London, pulling down these 
brackets and friezes and large names, restoring to the 
tradesmen the capital they had spent in architecture, 
and putting them on honest and equal terms, each 
with his name in black letters over his door." 

Symmetry, proportion, and colour form the subjects 
of important passages in *' The Lamp of Beauty." 
Vertical equality, against which a young architect 
ought to be warned in his elementary lesson, Ruskin 
found to be usual in Modern Gothic; it has not be- 
come less so in Gothic more modern still. He would 
have symmetry to belong to horizontal, and propor- 
tion to vertical, division ; symmetry being obviously 
connected with the idea of balance, which is only 
lateral. Colour on a building should be that of an 
organised creature, and the colours of an organised 
creature are visibly independent (this word must 
serve for lack of a better) of the form of its limbs. 
It is arbitrary, and has a plan of its own — the 
plan of colour. Ruskin would not have us give 
to separate mouldings separate colours, nor even to 
leaves or figures one colour and to the ground an- 
other. And in general '' the best place for colour is 
on broad surfaces, not on spots of interest in form." 
When the colouring is brought to pass by the natural 
hue of blocks of marble, the chequers are not to be 
harmonised or fitted to the forms of the windows. 
As in the Doge's Palace, the front should look as if 
the surface had first been finished, and the windows 



"the seven lamps of architecture" 93 

then cut out of it. This rule of beauty is distinctly 
also a rule of power. It is, needless to say, a point 
of architectural controversy, and the doctrine of Rus- 
kin on colour has been held in horror. He has on 
his side the Byzantine builders with their perdurable 
colouring by incrustation, and against him Antiquity 
and most of the northern Gothic schools. Then 
follows the page on Giotto's tower, model of propor- 
tion, design, and colour, " coloured like a morning 
cloud and chased like a sea shell " : 

" And if this be, as I believe it, the model and 
mirror of perfect architecture, is there not something 
to be learned by looking back to the early life of him 
who raised it ? I said that the power of human mind 
had its growth in the Wilderness ; much more must 
the love and the conception of that beauty whose 
every line and hue we have seen to be, at the least, a 
faded image of God's daily work, and an arrested ray 
of some star of creation, be given chiefly in the places 
which He has gladdened by planting the fir tree and 
the pine. Not within the walls of Florence, but 
among the far away fields of her lilies, was the child 
trained who was to raise the headstone of Beauty 
above her towers of watch and war. Remember all 
that he became ; count the sacred thoughts with which 
he filled the heart of Italy ; ask those who followed 
him what they learned at his feet ; and when you 
have numbered his labours, and received their testi- 
mony, if it seem to you that God had verily poured 
out upon this His servant no common nor restrained 
portion of His Spirit, and that he was indeed a King 
among the children of men, remember also that the 
legend upon his crown was that of David's : ' I took thee 
from the sheep-cote, and from following the sheep.' " 



94 JOHN RUSKIN 

" No inconsiderable part of the essential character 
of Beauty depends on the expression of vital energy 
in organic things, or on the subjection to such energy 
of things naturally passive and powerless." This is 
amongst the opening sentences of " The Lamp of 
Life," and the theme is rich in the hands of the most 
vital of writers. Even readers in whose ears this 
eloquence is too much inflected, too full of wave, too 
much moved in its beauty to be a perfect style, must 
confess a vitality that makes the vivacity of other 
authors seem but a trivial agitation. Ruskin always 
carried that rich internal burden, a vast capacity of 
sincerity. Others may have been entirely sincere; 
and he could be no more than entirely sincere. And 
yet what a difference in the degree of integrity ! And 
the measure of this capacity for truth is the measure 
of vitality. It is by force of life that Ruskin hoped, 
in these early works of his, and by force of life that 
he so despaired in the later works as almost to per- 
suade himself, for very grief, that he cared no longer 
for the miseries of cities, but was glad to enjoy his 
days in peace. 

The passage on dead architecture is an example of 
the profound misgiving that has beset all prophets, a 
distrust of the world and of its final work ; it is also a 
passage of literature that has cost much. Among 
corrupted styles Ruskin has tolerance of that which is 
animated and unafraid — the Flamboyant design of 
France. And — because the question of life is locked 
(when the sculpture is that of natural form) in the 
question of finish, the student should consult these 



"the seven lamps of architecture" 95 

sayings : " Sculpture is not the mere cutting of the 
form of anything in stone ; it is the cutting of the 
effect of it. The sculptor must paint with his chisel ; 
half his touches are not to realise, but to put power 
into, the form." " The Lamp of Life," with its 
several arguments and its essential significance, is a 
solemn chapter appealing directly to the obligations 
of immortal man; "The Lamp of Memory," a most 
delicate one, in which the author is all but compelled 
to say somewhat more than he could stand to, and 
yet unsays no more than a note will answer. Except 
the page in which he had bidden men to refrain from 
decorating a railway station (a page that filled the 
artistic public with an incredulous surprise, where- 
from they have hardly yet recovered, though, to do 
them justice, it did not cause them to pause in any 
cast-iron work they might have been about), perhaps 
nothing in The Seven Latnps has been found so mem- 
orable by the greater number of readers as the passage 
that declares Ruskin's lack of delight in an Alpine 
landscape transposed in fancy to the western hemis- 
phere. *^' The flowers in an instant lost their light, 
the river its music." " Yet not all their light, nor 
all its music," says the note. What then ? Never 
was a thought more certainly doubtful, double, de- 
niable, undeniable. Ruskin's description of that 
landscape — a description which, of course, depends 
for its cogency in the argument upon the fact that it 
takes no note of the historical interest of the Alps — 
is a finished work, exquisite with study of leaf and 
language, but yet not effective in proportion to its 



g6 JOHN RUSKIN 

own beauty and truth. Ruskin wrote it in youth, in 
the impulse of his own discovery of language, and of 
all that English in its rich modern freshness could do 
under his mastery — and it is too much, too charged, 
too anxious. Some sixty lines of "word-painting" 
are here ; and they are less than this line of a 
poet: 

" Sunny eve in some forgotten place." 

This refraining phrase is of more avail to the imagi- 
nation than the splendid subalpine landscape of The 
Seven Lamps. Another page of this chapter has also 
become famous^^that which begins, " Do not let us 
talk then of Restoration. The thing is a lie from be- 
ginning to end." The last lamp is that of Obedience. 
(Many years later, in Fors Clavigera^ Ruskin confesses 
that he had much ado to keep the Lamps to seven, 
they would so easily become eight or nine on his 
hands.) It contains, among much fruit of thought, 
the author's definite counsel to the world as to the 
choice among the logical and mature styles of Euro- 
pean architecture. He forbids any infantine or any 
barbarous style, " however Herculean their infancy, or 
majestic their outlawry, such as our own Norman, or 
the Lombard Romanesque." Of the four that are to 
choose from — the Pisan Romanesque, the early Gothic 
of the Western Italian Republics, the Venetian Gothic, 
and the English earliest decorated — the architect is 
urged to learn the laws so surely that he may finally 
win the right of exercising his own liberty and inven- 
tion. And a manifold meditation on obedience closes 



"the seven lamps of architecture" 97- 

with another recollection of early religious menace 
and expectation : 

" I have paused, not once or twice, as I wrote, and 
often have checked the course of what might other- 
wise have been importunate persuasion, as the thought 
has crossed me, how soon all Architecture may be 
vain, except that which is not made with hands. 
There is something ominous in the light which has 
enabled us to look back with disdain upon the ages 
among whose lovely vestiges we have been wandering. 
I could smile when I hear the hopeful exultation of 
many, at the new reach of worldly science, and vigour 
of worldly effort ; as if we were again at the begin- 
ning of days. There is thunder on the horizon as 
well as dawn. The sun was risen upon the earth 
when Lot entered Zoar." 

A reader with the world-pitying heart of the world 
of our later day is dismayed at the severity and at the 
calm of this universal threat. The visionary beauty 
of the phrase has none of that grief which is heard in 
the vaticination of another prophetic author, Coventry 
Patmore, who yet menaced not the whole world but 
one degenerate land, foretelling the day when — 

" A dim heroic nation, long since dead, 
The foulness of her agony forgot " — 

England shall be remembered only by her then dead 
language — " the bird-voice and the blast of her omnil- 
oquent tongue." 



CHAPTER VII 

"the stones of VENICE" (185I-1853) 

RusKiN, penetrated with a sense of the " baseness 
of the schools of architecture and nearly every other 
art, which have for three centuries been predominant 
in Europe," wrote this book principally in order to 
convict those base schools, locally, in their central 
degradation. Locally, because in Venice, and in 
Venice only, could the Renaissance be effectually 
reached, judged, and sentenced. " Destroy its claims 
to admiration there " (when Ruskin began his work 
they were triumphant) " and it can assert them no- 
where else." He intended to make the Stones of 
Venice touchstones, and to detect, " by the moulder- 
ing of her marble, poison more subtle than ever was 
betrayed by the rending of her crystal." And be- 
yond this — one of the most interesting and definite 
motives that ever urged the making of a book — stands 
the inevitable argument of his life : " Men are in- 
tended, without excessive difficulty ... to know 
good things from bad." 

The work is thus local because the " festering lily " 
of Shakespeare had its unique foulness in Venice. 
That city had been in an early age of her long history 
the central meeting-place of the Lombard from the 
north and the Arab from the south over the wreck 
98 



"the stones of VENICE 99 

of the Roman empire. It was through this fruitful 
encounter that the Ducal Palace became " the central 
building of the world." All European architecture 
derives from Greece, through Rome, and the condi- 
tions of place and of race bring to pass the all-unique 
variety of derivation. In Venice the variety was also 
all-important ; and Raskin begins the study of the 
art in its rise, greatness, decline, and last corruption, 
by a brief but large history of this nation, standing, 
as a sea-nation, a ruin between Tyre (no more than 
a memory) and England still imperial. He divides 
the national life of Venice, between the nine hundred 
years from her foundation (421 A. d.) and the five 
hundred years of her decline and fall, by the measure 
called the Serrar del Consiglio, which finally and 
fatally distinguished the nobles from the commonalty, 
and withdrew the power from the people and the 
Doge alike. " Ah, well done, Venice ! Wisdom 
this, indeed ! " had been Ruskin's note to Sansovino's 
summary of the constitution of Venice before the 
Serrar del Consiglio : " She found means to commit 
the government not to one, not to few, not to many, 
but to the many good, to the few better, and to the 
best one." Ruskin places the beginning of the de- 
cline in 1418 ; so that even her religious painters 
came later, and her great school about a century later, 
more or less. The sensitive arts of architecture and 
sculpture seem to have taken the mortal hurt more 
quickly than the art of painting, incorrupt in Venice 
later than elsewhere by reason of the life of its in- 
comparable colour. In the introductory chapter. 



LofC. 



100 JOHN RUSKIN 

"The Quarry," Ruskin gives us that instance of the 
tombs of the two Doges which is an example of the 
great essential contention of the book. The one 
tomb, not primitive, not altogether fine, an early fif- 
teenth-century work, has a nobility yet unforegone; 
the other, half a century later, is the tomb of Andrea 
Vendramin, the most costly ever bestowed on a Vene- 
tian monarch, praised by popular taste and authorita- 
tive criticism with all their superlatives, while the 
other was contemned. Climbing to see more of this 
later effigy, which he perceived to be ignoble, Ruskin 
found that the much vaunted sculptured hand, in 
sight, had no fellow but a block, and so with the aged 
brow, wrinkled only where it might be seen, the aged 
cheek, smooth, and also distorted, where it lay out of 
sight. Ruskin would have had nothing but praise 
for treatment of sculpture according to the position 
of the effigy ; but this was another matter : 

" Who, with a heart in his breast, could have stayed 
his hand, as he reached the bend of the grey forehead, 
and measured out the last veins of it as so much the 
zecchin ? " 

It was not necessary that Ruskin should follow up 
this sculptor and find him condemned for forgery; his 
own sentence strikes close enough. 

The lesson on architecture that follows is offered 
to a reader who is to be taught to build and to dec- 
orate, and who, in order thereto, is to be set free 
from the poor fiction — is it even so much ? has it life 
enough for feigning ? — that the decorations of the 



"THE STONES OF VENICE lOI 

modern world are delightful to man. " Do you seri- 
ously imagine," asks our teacher, " that any living 
soul in London likes triglyphs ? . . . Greeks 
did : English people never did, and never will." 

" The first thing we have to ask of decoration is 
that it should indicate strong liking. . . . The 
old Lombard architects liked hunting : so they cov- 
ered their work with horses and hounds. 
The base Renaissance architects liked masquing and 
fiddling; so they covered their work with comic 
masks and musical instruments. Even that was bet- 
ter than our English way of liking nothing and pro- 
fessing to like triglyphs." 

Ruskin calls upon us for deliberate question and 
upright answer as to our affections. 

But first comes the long historical lesson on con- 
struction : on the wall, which is so built that it is not 
"dead wall " ; on the pier, the base, the shaft, with a 
special emphasis upon the transition from the actual 
to the apparent cluster, illustrated by plans ; on arch 
masonry, the arch load, the roof, and the buttress. 
Of all this, obviously, no indication in this summary 
is possible. The introductory lesson on decoration is 
another version of the often-repeated teaching on 
natural form : 

" All the lovely forms of the universe . 
whence to choose, and all the lovely lines that bound 
their substance or guide their motion. . . . 
There is material enough in a single flower for the 
ornament of a score of cathedrals : but suppose we 
were satisfied with less exhaustive appliance, and built 



102 >JOHN RUSKIN 

a score of cathedrals each to illustrate a single flower ? 
that would be better than trying to invent new styles, 
I think. There is quite difference of style enough, 
between a violet and a hare-bell, for all reasonable 
purposes." 

Who can read such a passage and not have gained 
a new felicity ? We owe the exquisite thought and 
phrase (at least in regard to its occasion) to that folly 
of the time wherein the book was written — the hope 
that a new kind of architecture was to come to pass 
through the initiative of the Crystal Palace. John 
Ruskin consents to pause and refute that idle boast. 
" The earth hath bubbles as the water hath," he says 
of the Sydenham " palace," " and this is of them." 
To return to this inexhaustible theme of the natural 
form ; Ruskin opposes Garnett, a writer who com- 
mends art (as writers on art have done at least every 
ten years since then) for its correction of nature. 
Art, according to Garnett, is to criticise nature by 
her own rules gathered from all her works, and he 
quotes the saying recorded of Raphael, " that the 
artist's object was to make things not as nature made 
them but as nature would make them." Ruskin 
replies : 

" I had thought that, by this time, we had done 
with that stale . . . and misunderstood saying. 
. . Raffaelle was a painter of humanity, and 
assuredly there is something the matter with human- 
ity, a few dovrebbes more or less, wanting in it. We 
have most of us heard of original sin, and may per- 
haps, in our modest moments, conjecture that we are 



"THE STONES OF VENICE IO3 

not quite what God, or Nature, would have us to be. 
RafFaelle had something to mend in humanity : I 
should have liked to have seen him mending a daisy, 
or a pease-blossom, or a moth." 

Then follows a page on the succession of the 
waves of the irregular sea. Not one of these hits " the 
great ideal shape," the corrected shape, nor will if we 
watch them for a thousand years. 

In the appendix to the first volume we may read 
much theology of Ruskin's own writing and of his 
father's, directed against the idea of a teaching 
Church, and showing him to be so docile a son as to 
follow his father not only in regard to " eternal inter- 
ests " but also in regard to temporal prosperity. If 
you care little for the first, says the elder Ruskin in 
effect, you must needs care for the second, and Prot- 
estantism means the wealth of nations. Not many 
years later, when he wrote Unto this Last^ John 
Ruskin had thought his own thoughts on the wealth 
of nations, and his father was amongst the dismayed 
readers. A more valuable page of the appendix is 
that which declares the rapid judgment to which 
Ruskin intends by Stones of Venice to train the reader 
— or rather for which he intends to set the reader free 
— to be attainable in painting as well as in architec- 
ture. We ought by a side-glance, as we walk down 
a gallery, to tell a good painting ; because, as in archi- 
tecture structure and expression are united, so in 
painting are execution and expression. Who will 
say, after this, that Ruskin sought too much for sym- 
bolism and allusion and the less pictorial characters 



104 JOHN RUSKIN 

of art ? " The business of a painter is to paint." 
He gave years of his life to Veronese, in whom the 
emotions were altogether subordinate. In fact Ruskin 
is the most liberal and universal of all lovers and 
critics of art, having eyes for all manners as for all 
matters : 

"A man long trained to love the monk's visions of 
Angelico turns in proud and ineffable disgust from the 
first work of Rubens ... he encounters across 
the Alps. , . . He has forgotten that while An- 
gelico prayed and wept . . . there was different 
work doing in the dank fields of Flanders ; — wild seas 
to be banked out; . . . hard ploughing and har- 
rowing of the frosty clay ; careful breeding of stout 
horses and fat cattle, . . . rough affections and 
sluggish imaginations, fleshy, substantial, iron-shod 
humanities. . . . And are we to suppose there is 
no nobility in Rubens .? masculine and universal sym- 
pathy with all this ? . . . On the other hand, a 
man trained ... in our Sir Joshua school, will 
not and cannot allow that there is any art at all in the 
technical work of Angelico. . . . We have been 
taught in England to think there can be no virtue but 
in a loaded brush and rapid hand ; but . . . there 
is art also in the delicate point and in the hand which 
trembles as it moves, not because it is more liable to 
err but because there is more danger in its error." 

In the second volume the study of St. Mark's is 
prefaced by that of the churches of Torcello and of 
Murano, those ancient villages whence in part Venice 
received her people. It is in the marble-mosaic Murano 
pavement of 1 140 — " one of the most precious monu- 
ments in Italy "—that the eye which replied with the 



THE STONES OF VENICE 



105 



splendour of its gift of vision to the splendour of the 
Venetian brush discovered the first Venetian colour. 
As to Byzantine building Ruskin teaches us the im- 
portance of this fact — that it is a style of " confessed 
incrustation," and shows us how far this fact carries. 
Venice on her islands, hard by a sandy and marshy 
coast, and in traffic with the East, built with the meaner 
materials and faced them with the marbles of her 
commerce. Her coloured architecture became rather 
flat, rather small, as well as precious, carrying porphyry, 
alabaster, and gold, and later the less perdurable but 
more precious colours of her painters. Incrustation 
is obviously " the only permanent chromatic decora- 
tion possible," as we know who trace with mixed 
feelings the vestiges of the Gothic painter at Bourges 
and at Winchester, in chocolate and green. Here, at 
St. Mark's, is no opaque surface-painting of the paint- 
er's mixing, but the colour of nature in jasper and 
marble, into which the light makes some way : " mar- 
bles that half refuse and half yield to the sunshine, 
Cleopatra-like, their 'bluest veins to kiss.' " Certain 
characters of construction and of decoration are im- 
plied by incrustation : for example, the delicacy that 
is to distinguish the plinths and cornices used for bind- 
ing this rich armature from those that are essential 
parts of the solid building ; the abandonment of nearly 
all expression in the body of the building, except that 
of strength, so that the Byzantine building shows no 
anxiety to disturb open surfaces; the solidity of the 
shafts, however precious in material, as an instinctive 
amends for the thinness of the precious surface on the 



I06 JOHN RUSKIN 

walls ; and the consequent variable size of the shafts, 
as rubies in a carcanet have the differences proper to 
their single values, and the emeralds of two ear-rings 
are not absolutely alike ; shallow cutting of the dec- 
oration, so that here are none of the hollows and 
hiding-places proper to the stone-work of the north. 
On this serene and sunny construction the decorator 
worked as one who traces a fine drawing, subduing 
and controlling figure and drapery to the surface of 
his film of marble. Little have they read this book 
who currently discuss the fanaticism of Ruskin in the 
matter of " truth," and charge him with so bigoted a 
love of integrity as to forbid the use of a marble sur- 
face on a construction of commoner substance ; an 
architect accuses him of this to-day as easily as a 
painter to-morrow will aver that Ruskin did not per- 
mit him to choose what he would record, but com- 
pelled him to record all that was before him. It is as 
the chief of the lovers of colour that Ruskin is the 
apologist of an incrusted church simply condemned as 
" ugly " by the taste of the guides of the world — that 
St. Mark's which was to him "a confusion of de- 
light," a " chain of language and life," that St. Mark's 
which he read, not in Gothic darkness and effort, but 
clearly, with the clearness of white dome and sky. 
No sign of carelessness of heart, to him, was the col- 
our of Venice, but a solemn investiture. As to the 
form, I may do no more here than record the little 
spray of leaves he draws on a page of Stones of Venice^ 
with a subtle difference in the progression of the pro- 
portions amongst the seven leaves ; and when you are 



"THE STONES OF VENICE IO7 

penetrated with the grace of these single things in 
their inter-relation, you read that these are the pro- 
portions of the facade of St. Mark's. Who but he 
has given a reader such a happy moment ? And as 
for the Byzantine spirit, he cries, of St, Mark's, " No 
city had suc'i a Bible." He perceives in it 

" That mighty humanity, so perfect and so proud, 
that hides no weakness beneath the mantle, and gains 
no greatness from the diadem ; the majesty of thought- 
ful form, on which the dust of gold and flame of jew- 
els are dashed, as the sea-spray upon the rock, and 
still the great Manhood seems to stand bare against 
the sky." 

The following section, on the nature of Gothic, is 
one of the most important chapters of Ruskin's archi- 
tectural work. 

Let it be remembered that he chose the Gothic of 
Venice for the sake of its local succession to this local 
Byzantine work. But he prefaces the lesson with a 
study of a«/'y^rW Gothic, — the Gothic of such almost 
abstract quality as would be difficult to define, even 
as red would be difficult to describe to one who had 
not seen it, but who must be told that it was the col- 
our mingled with blue to make this violet, and with 
yellow to make yonder orange. Universal Gothic, 
like other great architecture, began with artless utter- 
ance. 

" It is impossible to calculate the enormous loss 
of power in modern days owing to the imperative re- 
quirement that art shall be methodical and learned." 



I08 JOHN RUSKIN 

For there will always be " more intellect than there 
can be education." But Gothic was in a special man- 
ner the work of the savage intellect, of the inventor, 
the intellectual workman ; it has not the same word 
to repeat, but the perpetual novelty of life. And, to 
the Gothic workman, living foliage — no longer the 
mere " explanatory accessory " of Lombardic or Ro- 
manesque sculpture — became " a subject of intense 
affection." Here is an incomparable Ruskin thought : 
the love of change, he tells us, that was in the char- 
acter of the Gothic sculptor, restless in following the 
hunt or the battle, " is at once soothed and satisfied as 
it watches the wandering of the tendril, and the bud- 
ding of the flower." And here a Ruskin phrase, also 
in its place incomparable : " Greek and Egyptian or- 
nament is either mere surface engraving ... or 
its lines are flowing, lithe, and luxuriant. . 
But the Gothic ornament stands out in prickly inde- 
pendence, and frosty fortitude, jutting into crockets, 
and freezing into pinnacles." In the same chapter is, 
amongst others, an admirable page upon redundance 
as a quality, not, needless to say, of all fine Gothic, 
but of the Gothic that is most full of all Gothic 
qualities, and especially the Gothic quality of humility : 
*' That humility which is the very life of the Gothic 
school is shown not only in the imperfection, but in 
the accumulation, of ornament." 

With the selfsame care are the many Gothic con- 
structions of Venice discovered by Ruskin's research 
as the few Byzantine ; nearly all, except the Ducal 
Palace, suffer from "the continual juxtaposition of the 



"THE STONES OF VENICE IO9 

Renaissance palaces ; . . . they exhaust their 
own life by breathing it into the Renaissance cold- 
ness." The Ducal Palace, according to Ruskin, was 
a work of sudden Gothic. It is unlike the true 
transitional work done between the final cessation of 
pure Byzantine building, about 1300, and its own 
date — 1320 to 1350. The struggle between Byzan- 
tine and Gothic (formed on the mainland) had been 
one of equals, equally organised and vital. Ruskin 
shows us the brilliant contest, with here and there a 
bit of true Gothic tangled and taken prisoner till its 
friends should come up and sustain it. And of the 
Gothic victory the English reader (Ruskin writes, in 
spite of all, for the ultra-English reader, the insular, 
the suburban, the very churchwarden) should note 
that the Venetian houses were the refined and ornate 
dwellings of " a nation as laborious, as practical, as 
brave, and as prudent as ourselves. ... At 
Venice, . . . Vicenza, Padua, and Verona the 
traveller may ascertain, by actual experience, the 
effect which would be produced upon the comfort 
and luxury of daily life by the revival of Gothic 
architecture " ; he may see the unruined traceries 
against the summer sky, or " may close the casements 
fitted to their unshaken shafts against such wintry 
winds as would have made an English house vibrate 
to its foundations." " I trust," said Ruskin, and his 
lesson has in part been learnt since then, " that there 
will come a time when the English people may see 
the folly of building basely and insecurely." The 
reader is led then at last to the Ducal Palace, and, in 



no JOHN RUSKIN 

honour of its sculptures, to a chapter on that great 
book of the Virtues as the Christian Venice honoured 
them ; from that chapter I must save this sentence on 
Plato — that the " moral virtues may be found in his 
writings defined in the most noble manner, as a great 
painter defines his figures, without outlines." 

When Gothic architecture came to the conquest 
of Byzantine in Venice, both were noble ; but when, 
in a later age, the Renaissance architecture attacked 
the Gothic, neither was purely noble. Ruskin shows 
us that " unless luxury had enervated and subtlety 
falsified the Gothic forms, Roman traditions could 
not have prevailed against them." The corrupt 
Gothic had become luxurious ; " in some of the best 
Gothic . . . there is hardly an inch of stone 
left unsculptured " ; but the decadent Gothic is at 
once extravagant and jaded. Against this degraded 
architecture " came the Renaissance armies ; and 
their first assault was in the requirement of universal 
perfection." The Renaissance workmen lost origi- 
nality of thought and tenderness of feeling, for the 
sake of their dexterity of touch and accuracy of 
knowledge. 

" The thought and the feeling which they despised 
departed from them, and they were left to felicitate 
themselves on their small science and their neat 
fingering. This is the history of the first attack of 
the Renaissance upon the Gothic schools. . . 
Now do not let me be misunderstood when I speak 
generally of the evil spirit of the Renaissance. The 
reader . . . will not find one word but of the 
most profound reverence for those mighty men who 



"THE STONES OF VENICE III 

could wear the Renaissance armour of proof, and yet 
not feel it encumber their living limbs — Leonardo and 
Michael Angelo, Ghirlandajo and Masaccio, Titian 
and Tintoret. But I speak of the Renaissance as an 
evil time, because, when it saw those men go burning 
forth into the battle, it mistook their armour for their 
strength ; and forthwith encumbered with the painful 
panoply every stripling who ought to have gone forth 
only with his own choice of three smooth stones out 
of the brook." 

Full of significance (I must take but one detail 
from this history of decline) is the fact that even in 
the finest examples of early Renaissance, where it was 
mingled with reminiscences of the Byzantine chro- 
matic work, the coloured marble was no longer a 
simple part of the masonry but was framed and repre- 
sented as hanging by ribbons. Of the central archi- 
tecture of the Renaissance, the Casa Grimani stands, 
in Ruskin's noble praises, as the best example. With 
the Vicenza Town Hall, with St. Peter's, Whitehall, 
and St. Paul's, this palace represents the building that 
has been set before the student, from the date of its 
invention to the day of the writing of the Stones of 
Venice^ as the antagonist of the barbarous genius. 
None the less was it a sign of the general withdrawal 
of architecture into " earthliness, out of all that was 
warm and heavenly." In its central works the Ve- 
netian Renaissance set up statues of the ancient Ve- 
netian virtues Temperance and Justice ; but these 
figures were furnished — as neither the left hand of 
the one nor the right hand of the other could be seen 
from below — with one hand each. 



112 JOHN RUSKIN 

" Its dragons are covered with marvellous scales, 
but have no terror or sting in them ; its birds are 
perfect in plumage, but have no song in them ; its 
children are lovely of limb, but have no childishness 
in them." 

The effigies upon its tombs evaded the thought of 
death ; its figure of the dead first indented the pillow 
"naturally," then rose on its elbow and looked about 
it, and finally stepped out of the tomb for public ap- 
plause, not with virtues, but with fame and victory, 
for companions. Ruskin takes us, through the stages 
of corruption, to the curtains and ropes, fringes, 
tassels, cherubs, the impotence of expression, the 
passionless folly, of the seventeenth century, more 
foul in Venice than elsewhere as the thing corrupted 
had been the best. Infidelity, Pride of State, Pride 
of System (or the confidence of definitely observable 
laws that never enabled man to do a great thing, and 
albeit literature and painting could break through, 
architecture could not) — these were the causes of the 
derogation of Venice. The rod had blossomed, pride 
had budded, violence had risen up. The chapter 
following this on the Roman Renaissance deals with 
the Grotesque of the Renaissance ; it shows us the 
mocking head — inhuman, weak, and finely finished, 
carved upon the base of the tower of Santa Maria 
Formosa, one of many hundreds to be found upon 
the later buildings. As the grotesque was, to Ruskin's 
mind, at its noblest in Dante (yet heaven help us, 
wretched race of man, if Dante's kugh is to be our 
mirth !) so it was at its thinnest and most malicious 



"the stones of VENICE II3 

in Renaissance ornament in Venice. That ornament 
closes the architecture of Europe. 

But the conclusion of this great book is an appeal 
not to despair, but to the hope of the race. It is a 
race still in its infancy, says John Ruskin, if we may 
take as tokens of puerility its foolish condemnation of 
the only work of art (Turner's) that was true to the 
science and truth professed by the age ; its misunder- 
standing of social and economic principles, so that it 
preached those impossibilities " liberty " and " equal- 
ity," and yet in no single nation dared to shut up its 
custom-houses ; its profession of charity and self-sac- 
rifice for the practice of individual man and its re- 
jection thereof for the practice of the State. If man- 
kind, then, was childish, it might be taught. And 
how much, in by-ways of opinion, the world did learn 
from Ruskin, of true learning, may be seen from an 
incident of this last chapter, in which he rebukes the 
painters of his day for painting Italy without olive- 
trees ! This they did because their teachers thought 
trees ought not to be known from one another, and 
you certainly cannot make olives like any other tree 
of the hillside. " The very school which carries its 
science in the representation of man down to the 
dissection of the most minute muscle, refuses so much 
science to the drawing of a tree as shall distinguish 
one species from another." Then follows a magnifi- 
cent apology for the barbaric olive as the dome of St. 
Mark's has it, and this allusion to the trees of the 
painters : 



114 JOHN RUSKIN 

" A few strokes of the pencil, or dashes of colour, 
will be enough to enable the imagination to conceive a 
tree; and in those dashes of colour Sir Joshua Reynolds 
would have rested, and would have suffered the imag- 
ination to paint what more it liked for itself, and grow 
oaks, or olives, or apples, out of the few dashes of 
colour at its leisure. On the other hand, Hobbema, 
one of the worst of the realists, smites the imagination 
on the mouth, and bids it be silent, while he sets to 
work to paint his oak of the right green." 

The painters of to-day, worthy the name, paint 
olives, and the world has been changed in other ways ; 
but it has not begun to restore a great time. 

For to the book, in so far as it is a book of persua- 
sion, there is this reply, and against it this contention : 
that it persuades to that whereto no man nor men can 
attain by any means they can be persuaded to lay hands 
upon. The German painters, for example, of the 
Overbeck school had doubtless a good will to paint 
as they should, and as Ruskin's teaching would ap- 
prove. But here is what he very rightly thought of 
them : 

" I know not anything more melancholy than the 
sight of the German cartoon, with its objective side 
and its subjective side; and mythological division and 
symbolical division ; its allegorical sense and literal 
sense; and ideal point of view and intellectual point 
of view ; its heroism of well-made armour and knitted 
brows . . . ; and twenty innocent dashes of the 
hand of one God-made painter, poor old Bassano or 
Bonifazio, were worth it all, and worth it ten thou- 
sand times over." 



"THE STONES OF VENICE II5 

Whereto, then, is the persuasion of this book di- 
rected ? As a book of history and of meditation on 
character and art it does its work ; but does it not it- 
self show us that as a book of persuasion it can do no 
work, for there is no work to be done ? Is a man to 
be persuaded, convinced, or converted to be such a 
man as this of Ruskin's description ? 

" It is no more art to lay on colour delicately 
than to lay on acid [the acid of the photographer is 
meant] delicately. It is no more art to use the cornea 
and retina for the reception of an image than to use a 
lens and a piece of silvered paper. But the moment 
that inner part of the man, or rather that entire and only 
being of the man, of which cornea and retina, fingers 
and hands, pencils and colours, are all the mere serv- 
ants and instruments ; that manhood has light in it- 
self, though the eyeball be sightless, and can gain in 
strength when the hand and the foot are hewn off and 
cast into the fire ; the moment this part of the man 
stands forth with its solemn ' Behold, it is I,' then the 
work becomes art indeed." 

In the preface to the third edition (1874) Ruskin 
confesses that his book had gained an influence, for 
Englishmen had begun to mottle their manufactory 
chimneys with black and red, and to adorn their banks 
and drapers' shops with Venetian tracery, but the chief 
purpose of the writing, which was to show the moral 
corruption as cause of the corruption of art, had been 
altogether neglected. 

" As a physician would . . . rather hear that 
his patient had thrown all his medicine out of the 



lib JOHN RUSKIN 

window, than that he had sent word to his apothecary 
to leave out two of its three ingredients, so I would 
rather, for my own part, that no architects had ever 
condescended to adopt one of the views suggested in 
this book." 

At the close of Stones of Venice he complains once 
more that all readers praised the style and none the 
substance. 

'' If . . . I had told, as a more egoistic person 
would, my own impressions, as thinking those, for- 
sooth, and not the history of Venice, the most impor- 
tant business, ... a large number of equally 
egoistic persons would have instantly felt the sincer- 
ity of the selfishness, clapped it, and stroked it, and 
said, ' That's me.' " 

The truth he had to tell he declares to have been 
*' denied and detested." 

Finally, a somewhat whimsical last page is filled 
with an extract from his diary of 1845, showing that 
he too could write like a critic of " chiaroscuro and 
other artistic qualities," but that he kept such obser- 
vations for the furnishing of his own science rather 
than for presentation to the public. And in the ap- 
pendix to Stones of Venice is an invaluable essay on 
the Venetian pictures. 



CHAPTER VIII 

" PRE-RAPHAELITISM " (1851) 

When the pictures of the young " pre-Raphaelite 
brethren " first appeared in the London exhibitions, 
the newspapers made loud complaints. Of pictures 
by Millais and Holman Hunt at the Academy the 
Times said : " These young artists have unfortunately 
become notorious by addicting themselves to an anti- 
quated style and an affected simplicity of painting. 
. . We can extend no toleration to a mere 
senile ' imitation of the cramped style, false perspec- 
tive, and crude colour of remote antiquity. 
That morbid infatuation which sacrifices truth, 
beauty, and genuine feeling to mere eccentricity de- 
serves no quarter at the hands of the public." Rus- 
kin then wrote to the Times two letters, signed " The 
Author of Modern Painters" protesting that the pic- 
tures in question were not false whether in feeling or 
perspective, that their laboriousness entitled them to 
more than a hasty judgment, and that great things 
might be expected of the painters. He blames them 
for looking too narrowly, and he perceives a flowing 

' The word is " senile " in early and late editions of Ruskin, but 
it is a strange word wherewith to rate young painters. The ad- 
jective you can read with your eyes shut, to go with " imitation," 
is " servile." 

117 



Il8 JOHN RUSKIN 

and an impulse in nature that outstrips such slow 
labours as theirs; but his praises of their execution, 
in its kind, and of their colour, are large. " I have 
no acquaintance with any of these artists, and very 
imperfect sympathy with them," says the first letter; 
the apology was undertaken for the love of natural 
truth, evidently dear to the new painters. The Times 
letters were followed immediately by a pamphlet. 
The pre-Raphaelite brethren, says the preface, had 
been assailed " with the most scurrilous abuse which 
I ever recollect seeing issue from the press " (it must 
be owned that Ruskin's angry sentence is ill-written 
in three places) ; and the contention that follows is 
exceedingly interesting for reasons that seem to have 
escaped its readers. That is, Ruskin has always been 
represented as the champion of a group of young 
men of talent. This he was, and a generous one ; he 
declared their work to be the " most earnest and com- 
plete " done in Europe since the day of Albert Diirer. 
But the pamphlet is by no means, in its essential 
argument, the eulogy of young men of talent. It is 
a frank proposal to young men of industry that they 
should apply themselves modestly to painting pictures 
of topographic, historic, scientific, or botanic interest 
pour servir. Ruskin is accused of seeing "genius " 
too readily ; but there could hardly be a more candid 
declaration (it was too candid to be altogether under- 
stood) that genius was not to be looked for. The 
author of Pre-Raphaelitism says in effect that what is 
to be demanded of a multitude of painters (who can 
be no more than workmen, and ought to be good 



" PRE-RAPH AELITISM 1 19 

workmen) is a trustworthy and useful record of con- 
temporary things having an unpictorial interest. He 
says further on : 

" Many people have found fault with me for not 

* teaching people how to arrange masses'; for not 

* attributing sufficient importance to composition.' 
Alas ! I attribute far more importance to it than they 
do — so much importance that I should just as soon 
think of sitting down to teach a man how to write a 
Divina Commedia or King Lear^ as how to '- compose,' 
in the true sense, a single building or picture." 

Such a comparison doubtless goes too far, or rather 
goes wrong, as demonstrations borrowed from each 
other by the arts must always do ; for certainly there 
are things to be taught to a painter that have no 
counterpart in any things possible to teach to a poet. 
But I quote the passage in sign of the curious conten- 
tion — it reappears in the first Slade lectures — that the 
majority of painters would do well to content them- 
selves with pictures that are hardly pictures. Noth- 
ing more humiliating was ever said of modern art ; it 
was so humiliating that no one would consent to un- 
derstand it; was indeed too humiliating to be just. 

The pre-Raphaelite pamphlet changes, after the in- 
troductory page, into a history of the art of Turner. 
Particularly instructive here is the history of the 
evolution of Turner's whole art of colour, from the 
kind of colour-stenography of the beginning; and 
excellent also the history of Turner's sympathy, of 
his ready admirations, of the help he consented to 
receive from weak painters, such as Claude, and re- 



120 JOHN RUSKIN 

fused from strong but more false painters, such as 
Salvator Rosa. 

" Besides, he had never seen classical life, and 
Claude was represented to him as a competent au- 
thority for it. But he had seen mountains and tor- 
rents, and knew therefore that Salvator could not paint 
them." 

In 1800, facing the Continental landscape for him- 
self, Turner cast Claude and the rest away, once for 
all, and relied upon his eagle eye, his imagination, and 
his ^' gigantic memory." Turner, says Ruskin, for- 
got himself, and forgot nothing else. 

The Times letters of 185 1 were followed by a 
letter, in 1854, in praise of Mr. Holman Hunt's 
" Light of the World " ; and in this place — although 
it belongs to a much later date — may also be men- 
tioned the paper on " The Three Colours of Pre- 
Raphaelitism " [Nineteenth Century^ 1878), memo- 
rable for the happy passage upon that picture which 
corrupt criticism used to call the greatest in the world. 
Ruskin rehearses his former grave accusation of 
Raphael, that he confused and quenched the " veraci- 
ties of the life of Christ " ; and adds : 

" Raphael . . . after profoundly studying the 
arabesques of Pompeii and of the palace of the 
Caesars, beguiled the tedium, and illustrated the 
spirituality, of the converse of Moses and Elias with 
Christ concerning His decease which He should ac- 
complish at Jerusalem, by placing them, above the 
Mount of Transfiguration, in the attitudes of two 
humming-birds on the top of a honeysuckle." 



CHAPTER IX 

"lectures on architecture and painting" (1853) 

John Ruskin's career as a lecturer began at Edin- 
burgh with a course of two lectures on architecture and 
two on painting. It was to take him later to the Slade 
chair at Oxford, to the Oxford Museum, to the Royal 
Institution, the London Institution, the South Kensing- 
ton Museum, to Cambridge, Eton, Manchester, Bir- 
mingham, Liverpool, Kendal, Bradford, Dublin, Tun- 
bridge Wells, Woolwich, and into the lecture rooms 
of University College, Christ's Hospital, the Lam- 
beth School of Art, St. Martin's School of Art, the 
Working Men's College, the Architectural Associa- 
tion, the Society of Arts, the Society of Antiquaries 
— and the list is not complete. This first appearance 
on the platform was made with the utmost charm of 
address, although the matter was controversial, and 
controversy followed. " I come before you," a pas- 
sage in the second lecture avows, " professedly to 
speak of things forgotten or things disputed." And 
his opponents joined issue with him on the importance 
of architectural ornament, on its place, on the union 
of architect and sculptor in one, and, in general, on 
the Gothic city. For it was to the Gothic city that 
Ruskin intended to persuade his Modern Athens. He 
set forth with a comparison of Edinburgh with Verona 
— the one city whereof the beauty lay without, and 

121 



122 JOHN RUSKIN 

the Other whereof it lay without and within. To be 
beautiful, a town must be domestically beautiful, beau- 
tiful cumulatively in its dwellings, beautiful success- 
ively along its streets : 

" The great concerted music of the streets . . . 
when turret rises over turret, and casement frowns 
beyond casement, and tower succeeds to tower along 
the farthest ridges of the inhabited hills — this is a 
sublimity of which you can at present form no con- 
ception." 

" Neither the mind nor the eye," he says else- 
where, " will accept a new college, or a new hospital, 
or a new institution, for a city " ; and a fine church 
in a vile street is nothing but a superstition. There- 
fore he would rouse the citizens against their Ionic 
and Corinthian column, repeated without delight; and 
defending once again — it is central to his teaching — 
the theory of the certainties of beauty, he says : 

" Examine well the channels of your admiration, 
and you will find that they are, in verity, as un- 
changeable as the channels of your heart's blood." 

Ruskin recommends the pointed window-opening 
for its greater strength. The common cross lintel is 
of a form that wastes strength, when it is strong, 
which, in modern building, is not often. And the 
pseudo-Greek decoration is wasted as well as the 
power, by its position at the top of the building. 
Pediments, stylobates, and architraves are dead. 
Fine Gothic is as various as nature's foliage, and this 



"lectures on architecture and painting 123 

Ruskin illustrates by an exquisite lesson on the leaves 
of the mountain ash ; a sculptor should not repeat 
his sculpture, as a painter should not paint the same 
picture. Moreover, fine Gothic ornament is visible j 
it is chiefly rich about the doors, it is rough at a 
height above the eye ; only in the degraded Gothic 
of Milan cathedral are the statues on the roof cut 
delicately. 

"Be assured that * handling' is as great a thing in 
marble as in paint, and that the power of producing a 
masterly effect with few touches is as essential in an 
architect as in a draughtsman." 

Thus he does not urge upon the modern citizen a 
costly manner of architecture, but resigns himself, 
since he must, to the poverty or penury of a society 
and age strangely given to boast of riches. The 
Gothic of dwellings is one with the Gothic church ; 
the apse of Amiens is *' but a series of windows sur- 
mounted by pure gables of open work " ; the spire, 
the pointed tower of South Switzerland, are but the 
roof, which ought always to be very visible, made yet 
more visible. 

" Have not those words Pinnacle, Turret, Belfry, 
Spire, Tower, a pleasant sound in all your ears ? 
Do you think there is any group of words 
which would thus interest you when the things ex- 
pressed by them are uninteresting ? " 

Some expense of controversy seems to be hardly 
worth while in Ruskin's contention that " ornamenta- 



124 JOHN RUSKIN 

tion is the principal part of architecture considered as 
a fine art." for when the word "principal" is 
thoroughly explained, nothing is left in the proposi- 
tion but what most architects would be willing to 
accept. 

" A Gothic cathedral is properly to be defined as a 
piece of the most magnificent associative sculpture 
arranged on the noblest principles of building." 

But this principle is pushed far by Ruslcin when he 
adds that architecture may be defined as " the art of 
designing sculpture for a particular place and placing 
it there on the best principles of building." Archi- 
tecture, said his opponents, is *■'- par excellence the art 
of proportion." So, rejoined Ruskin, is all art in the 
world, and none par excellence ; all art depends from 
the beginning upon proportion for its existence, and 
Gothic has more proportions than other architecture, 
having a greater number of members. 

The final lesson of the lectures is that Gothic with 
its liberal variety and interest " implies the liberty of 
the workman." Such a plea Ruskin thought would 
have won some reply from the modern heart ; but it 
elicited none. 

The two lectures on painting deal, the one with 
Turner and Claude (ground trodden in Modern 
Painters)^ and the other with the reforms attempted by 
the English pre-Raphaelites. 



CHAPTER X 

"elements of drawing" (1857) 

The three Letters to Beginners printed with this 
title require of the learner a simple discipleship and 
confidence — not blind, for everything is shown him in 
time, but expectant, and with good reasons for being 
intellectually predisposed to receive this instruction 
rather than another. It would be well to warn a 
student in Ruskin's drawing-class to look well to 
those reasons and to be sure they are good ; for the 
teaching is intolerant of mixture with any other 
methods. That teaching, merely as it stands in this 
small book — lost in the astonishing quantity of its 
author's labours of the mind — proves an entire system 
of thought and practice, justified by pure principle 
and by the analysis of the work of masters. But the 
modern reader may wonder whether, a painter having 
been duly born, but having yet to be made, he would 
have a chance of being well made under the guidance 
of this book. Let no one think that if there were 
failure it would be the consequence of too literary a 
quality of instruction, and of the influence of a literary 
mind ; Ruskin's work in these letters is artist's work, 
designer's and painter's work ; Raskin is more sure of 
the world of bodily vision, more obedient to all its 
limits — in a word, more technical — than an ordinary 
drawing-master in his class would know how to be. 

125 



126 JOHN RUSKIN 

Ruskin teaches his students to look at nature with 
simple eyes, to trust sight as the sense of the painter, 
a sense to be kept untampered with, unprompted, and 
unhampered. In a book on Velasquez, published in 
the winter of Ruskin's death, by a critic who perhaps 
would not have consented to quote a precept from 
Ruskin, nearly a page is devoted to the record of what 
the writer had been fortunate enough to hear said by 
a French painter ; and this proves to be but a long 
statement of what Ruskin taught in a single phrase 
when he bade the student to seek to recover the in- 
nocence of the eye. And yet in spite of admirable 
theory, the frequently recurring praises of William 
Hunt, the water-colour painter of fruit, add to the 
reader's uneasiness. On the other hand, the student 
is taught to perceive the greatness of the greatest 
masters : 

" You may look, with trust in their being always 
right, at Titian, Veronese, Tintoret, Giorgione, John 
Bellini, and Velasquez. You may look with admira- 
tion, admitting, however, question of right and wrong, 
at Van Eyck, Holbein, Perugino, Francia, Angelico, 
Leonardo da Vinci, Correggio, Vandyck, Rembrandt, 
Reynolds, Gainsborough, Turner, and the modern pre- 
Raphaelites." 

Michelangiolo, Raphael, and Rubens are great 
masters, but not masters for students ; Murillo, Sal- 
vator, Claude, Gaspar Poussin, Teniers, are danger- 
ous. 

"You may look, however, for examples of evil, 
with safe universality of reprobation, being sure that 



"elements of drawing 127 

everything you see is bad, at Domenichino, the Ca- 
racci, Bronzino, and the figure pieces of Salvator." 

In this lesson, the teacher disclaims any intention 
of placing his great ones higher or lower than one 
another ; it is a lesson for those who go to the gal- 
leries to learn to work and not only to learn to judge. 
Let us contrast with this another lesson (this one 
from the appendix) on things to be studied, whereby 
the young artist is directed to read the poets — Scott, 
Wordsworth, Keats, Crabbe, Tennyson, the two 
Brownings, Lowell, Longfellow, and Coventry Pat- 
more alone amongst the moderns. " Cast Coleridge 
at once aside, as sickly and useless ; and Shelley as 
shallow and verbose." Byron is but withheld for a 
time, with praise of his " magnificence." And we 
have Patmore — the poet of spiritual passion and lofty 
distinction — praised for " quiet modern domestic feel- 
ing " and a " finished piece of writing." And Shelley 
" verbose " — Adonais verbose, and not Endymion ! All 
the living poets whom Ruskin praised — Browning, 
Rossetti, and Patmore amongst them — had to endure 
to be praised side by side with Longfellow, and they 
did not love the association. But in all this strange 
sentence nothing is less intelligible than the word 
which commends to the young student — urged in the 
same breath to restrict himself to what is generous, 
reverend, and peaceful — all the writings of Robert 
Browning. The student is warned to refrain from 
even noble, even pure, satire, from coldness, and from 
a sneer ; and is yet sent to a poet who gave his imag- 



128 JOHN RUSKIN 

ination to the invention of infernal hate in the 
Spanish Cloister^ and of the explanations of Mr. Sludge 
and Bishop Blougram, busily, indefatigably squalid 
and ignoble, and delighting in derision. This appen- 
dix must have been written in a perverse mood ; but 
in the text what exquisite lessons of proportion, and 
of colour ! For instance, "The eye should feel white 
as a space of strange, heavenly paleness in the midst 
of the feeling of colours," and " You must make the 
black conspicuous, the black should look strange " ; 
what a sense of the growth of trees, of flowers with 
their delicate inflections of law, their vital symmetry 
and asymmetry, and their progress, their relation, from 
stem to limit of leaf; what a steady — nay eternal — 
vision of movement — ''the animal in its motion, the 
tree in its growth, the cloud in its course, the moun- 
tain in its wearing away ! " And in the lesson on 
colour occurs the humour that might be a woman's 
or a child's, if woman or child could ever be womanly 
or childish enough to conceive it — it is in a fine pas- 
sage on the economy of nature : " Sometimes I have 
really thought her miserliness intolerable ; in a gen- 
tian, for instance, the way she economises her ultra- 
marine down in the bell is a little too bad." With 
Elements of Drawing should be named Elements of 
Perspective^ a series of lessons intended to be read in 
connection with the first three books of Euclid, signs 
of yet another intellect — the mathematical — added to 
this wonderful spirit. The drawings that accompany 
Elements of Drawing are of great beauty. 



CHAPTER XI 

"the political economy of art" (1857) 

This little volume holds the substance of two 
lectures given at Manchester. The lecturer exercises 
here the pleasant art of stimulating his hearers by a 
paradox, and of following the phrase of surprise by an 
irrefutable exposition. His theme is the right ex- 
penditure of public money. He, like the other econ- 
omists, has to find room, in the national dispensa- 
tions, for expense upon the arts, and in some sort 
the luxuries, of life. Christian and ascetic, he has to 
consent to this use of the fruits of the labours of the 
poor, as the severe but not ascetic " Manchester " 
economist also must needs do. Mill, who insists that 
all unproductive consumption is so much loss and de- 
struction, evidently arranges for, and tolerates, so 
much loss and destruction in a certain cause ; he 
allows the artist to destroy what he consumes. With 
such permission a purely scientific writer has nothing 
to do. Like a writer on arithmetic, a writer on polit- 
ical economy proper states these laws, those causes, 
and yonder consequences, and is not called upon, as 
an economist, to approve or disapprove of an act that 
would disregard the purely economic results. (I shall 
have to urge the same point in regard to the later 
work — Unto this Last.) And this is why it is irritat- 
ing to hear men speak of doing such or such a thing 

129 



130 JOHN RUSKIN 

" in spite of the political economists," or " notwith- 
standing the professors of the dismal science." The 
calculators of a nation's wealth are simply to state 
their calculations; that done, they might be the first 
to cherish ethical, or political, or human reasons why 
loss and gain should in such or such a case be disre- 
garded ; or, on the other hand, they might hold it to 
be wiser to disregard the results in loss and gain as 
little as possible. But in either case they would cease 
for the time to speak purely as economists or calcula- 
tors. Ruskin, needless to say, unites the two func- 
tions, as indeed almost all other writers have done. 
He thinks precisely, and having " done the sum," he 
passes to the other function, and does the ethical work 
for which his calculation has given him material. In 
these two lectures he plans some order in that strictly 
unproductive expenditure without which civilisation 
could hardly endure. The theme of this book is 
righteous spending, while the theme of Time and Tide 
is chiefly righteous sparing -, and he has much to say 
here of the honour and the power of riches and the 
disgrace (let us say the disgrazia in the Italian sense) 
of poverty, while in Fors Clavigera he gives a solemn 
personal assurance — solemn and personal even for 
him — that for the rich man there is no safety unless 
he shall " piously and prudently " dispose himself to 
become poor. But the poverty he deplores is mani- 
festly the ignorant and forsaken poverty that no man 
ought to endure ; the poverty for the love whereof a 
man of heart despoils himself is the poverty of sim- 
plicity ; and even the poverty of the simple is to be 



"the political economy of art 131 

sought chiefly in order that there should be none, or 
less, of the poverty of the forsaken. In this very 
lecture on the administration of wealth for the foster- 
ing of art, the nation and the man are warned alike 
that the spending which would be lawful in a society 
where none were starving for lack of work ought to 
be foregone or deferred there where children have no 
bread. 

The nation, says in effect the lecturer on " The 
Political Economy of Art," is as free and as bound, 
as responsible and as dependent in its inter-rela- 
tion, as a household, and a nation is governable like 
a farm. If any one shall say that the similitude is 
too domestic, the reply shall be that it is not domestic 
enough. 

" The real type of a well-organised nation must be 
presented, not by a farm cultivated by servants who 
wrought for hire, . . . but by a farm in which 
the master was a father, and in which all the servants 
were sons." 

With a peculiar humour, Ruskin begs his hearers not 
to be alarmed at the menacing word " fraternity." 
The French who used it, he declares (for the reas- 
suring of a Manchester audience) to have gone wrong 
in their experiment. But the cause of their error he 
states without irony. It was that they refused to ac- 
knowledge that fraternity implied a paternity. The 
world, nevertheless, does not utter the word paternal 
without burlesque — " a paternal government " — nor 
the word fraternal without defiance. It does not 



132 JOHN RUSKIN 

chance that paternity is spoken of threateningly or 
fraternity with irony ; but this might have been the 
humour of the commonwealth, instead of the other. 
Obviously, what Ruskin teaches in the political part 
of this lecture is the necessity of authority and — once 
the arbitrary tyrannies of primitive society are done 
away, which is early in all civilisations^the nullity 
of the " liberty " that men have died for with alacrity 
age by age. 

Wealth ought not to be acquired by covetousness, 
nor distributed by prodigality, nor hoarded by avarice, 
nor increased by competition, nor destroyed by luxury. 
To none of these forms of egoism should be aban- 
doned the important economy of money. Ruskin in- 
sists upon the special responsibility of man for that 
talent — not the talent of wit or intellect or influence 
with the bishops, but the talent of money literally. 
In " The Political Economy of Art " the reader 
should note the fine page upon the destruction of 
wealth, as well as of art, that is wrought not by the 
tooth of time : 

" Fancy what Europe would be now, if the delicate 
statues and temples of the Greeks, — if the broad 
roads and massy walls of the Romans, — if the noble 
and pathetic architecture of the middle ages had not 
been ground to the dust by mere human rage." 



CHAPTER XII 

"the two paths" (1859) 

The principal teaching of this volume, ratified by 
a preface in 1878, is summed up thus : 

"The law which it has been my effort chiefly to il- 
lustrate is the dependence of all noble design, in any 
kind, on the sculpture or painting of Organic Form. 
This is the vital law : lying at the root of all that I 
have ever tried to teach respecting architecture or 
any other art. It is also the law most generally dis- 
allowed." 

It is possible that to this book was due much of the 
impatience and anger spent, the day before yesterday, 
upon Ruskin's art-theory. By the day before yester- 
day I mean the time of a flow that has already been 
succeeded by some ebbing movement, and, in this 
ease, the time between the popularising in England 
of the "art for art" of the French, about 1880, and 
the day when the last journalist flagged in the last 
repetition thereof — and it took him nearly twenty 
years. In October 1899 a fugitive writer in a con- 
spicuous art-review spoke of " the unutterable bosh 
written by Ruskin about art " ; and the inferior clown- 
ishness of that reviewer is only the latest mimicking 
of the higher clownishness of criticism a little earlier 
written. 

^33 



134 JOHN RUSKIN 

The teaching of The Two Paths has been thought 
out by its author in the very interior intricacies. It 
is dogmatic in proportion to the difficulty which he 
certainly knows he found in that inner place, but 
which he never explicitly confesses. Two paths 
there are, he teaches, one leading to destruction and 
the other to life. The one is that of the artist who 
loves his own skill and seeks first his pleasure in 
beauty, and the other is that of him who loves nature 
and studies the beauty of her truth and never lets go 
his grasp upon the laws of natural living form. Both 
artists may — nay, must — draw conventionally at 
times, and at times must design the mosaic patterns, 
or the diaper patterns, that ultimately resemble each 
other, assuredly, from whichever path they are ap- 
proached. It seems that Ruskin insists upon a differ- 
ence, even in this ultimate point. And yet the pret- 
tiest and most ingenious oriental diaper of fret-work 
(which he denounces) has a suggestion in natural 
curve, or even in the curve of organic life, as the 
Lombard ornament (which he approves) has a sugges- 
tion in natural crystallisation — that is, in something 
other than organic form properly so-called. A similar 
difficulty occurs to the reader in regard to all " con- 
vention," however slight. 

This, however, is a difficulty, as it were, at the end 
of the argument. At its head Ruskin has placed a 
difficulty that meets the reader with a very menace. 
The title of this first lecture is " The Deteriorative 
Powers of Conventional Art over Nations." The 
adjective " conventional " seems to mitigate the predi- 



"THE TWO PATHS I35 

cate of this lecture; but there is no such mitigation 
in the text, which declares roundly that from the mo- 
ment when a perfect picture is painted or a perfect 
statue wrought within a State, that State begins to 
derogate. Not only is the word " conventional " 
omitted, but the word " perfect " seems to bar it out. 
Then comes the tremendous contrast with which 
Ruskin commands his readers and compels them to 
attend to what shall follow. Thus it stands : India 
(then lately guilty of the Mutiny and accused of more 
evil than she had committed) is a nation possessed of 
exquisite art, but given over to every infernal passion 
— cruelty and the rest. Scotland is a nation full of 
the dignity of virtue and possessed of no art whatever 
except that of arranging lines of colour at right angles 
in the plaid. Splendid are these pages, with their 
nobility and temperance of diction in the statement 
of what is most certainly a disastrous exaggeration. 
They close with the assertion of a brief and absolute 
opposition : " Out of the peat cottage come faith, 
courage, self-sacrifice, purity, and piety . . . ; out 
of the ivory palace come treachery, cruelty, cowardice, 
idolatry, bestiality." Who, nevertheless, in calmer 
thought dare ratify such a sentence ? " Piety " — alas ! 
" Purity " — alas, alas ! The judgment on the Hindoo 
calls for more indignant groans. To pass to the art, 
however : Indian art " never represents a natural fact," 
says Ruskin ; but (putting aside the certain truth that 
it is suggested by natural fact, and that the European 
"conventional" art is no more than suggested by 
natural fact) what becomes of his contention that 



136 JOHN RUSKIN 

Indian art is therefore a portent of degradation, in 
view of the statement on a previous page that the 
perfect statue and the perfect picture were also, in 
Rome and Venice, portents of degradation ? Surely 
the perfect statue represents a natural fact. And 
at the end of a close and urgent argument, the 
reader asks where, then, is Scotland in all this ? 
The Scot of the cottage does not produce the art 
taught by organic form which is so nobly described as 
righteous — he produces no art; or stay, he produces 
the plaid just mentioned, which is much, much less 
organic than anything in the whole range of Indian 
design. The curve of an Indian shawl-pattern has a 
natural inspiration ; what life — let alone the noble 
animal and human life which Ruskin declares to be 
the highest inspiration of art — but what life, however 
humble, what life of any degree of humbleness, is 
represented, much less imitated, by the plaid ? To 
despise life is, Ruskin teaches, the first and ultimate 
sin. Well, then, asks his reader, are they to be held 
innocent of that sin who, having before their eyes 
the living proportion of common plant-growth, and 
the form of rock, less vital yet erect in all the gravity 
of natural law, yet turned their eyes away and ruled 
the lines of their tartan; who, having in sight the 
soft gloomy purple of their heather and the soft brown 
of their streams, chose to put that yellow line between 
that blue and that red — the hardest colours of all 
men's invention ? I want such a phrase as Ruskin 
alone could give me to denounce the hatred of nature 
and the contempt of life which the plaid could be 



"THE TWO PATHS I37 

made to prove. And see what significance he attaches 
to the mere straying from nature in the Hindoo ! 
" He draws no plant, but only a spiral." But the 
Scot loved the plant not enough to draw even a 
spiral ; he ruled straight lines. 

If I have treated this book with controversy, it was 
impossible to do otherwise. But out of its treasures 
of wisdom take the page in praise of Titian which 
ends with the passage : " Nobody cares much at heart 
about Titian ; only there is a strange undercurrent of 
everlasting murmur about his name, which means the 
deep consent of all great men that he is greater than 
they," and so on to the end. For wit take this, from 
the important section of the lecture on " Modern 
Manufacture and Design," that partly condemns the 
usual teaching of symmetry : 

" If you learn to draw a leaf well, you are taught 
. . to turn it the other way, opposite to itself; 
and the two leaves set opposite ways are called ' a 
design,' . . . But if once you learn to draw the 
human figure, you will find that knocking two men's 
heads together does not necessarily constitute a good 
design." 

The incident (in the same lecture) of the sporting 
handkerchief is full of signs of charming wit. The 
reader must be referred to the illustration, but let him 
be assured that Ruskin had the best of it in his con- 
troversy with his friend. His friend proved to him 
that series, symmetry, and contrast were the material 
of design, but used them so cleverly that Ruskin could 



138 JOHN RUSKIN 

show him by his own work how such use could not 
be taught, measured, or ruled ; and, moreover, used 
them with so little beauty that Ruskin was able to 
reply to him that not mere symmetry, but lovely 
symmetry, was proper to art. For felicity of word 
read what follows : 

" Outside the town I came upon an old English 
cottage, or mansion, I hardly know which to call it, 
set close under the hill, and beside the river, . 
with mullioned windows and a low arched porch ; 
round which, in the little triangular garden, one can 
imagine the family as they used to sit in old summer 
times, the ripple of the river heard faintly through the 
sweet-briar hedge, and the sheep on the far-ofF wolds 
shining in the evening sunlight. There, uninhabited 
for many and many a year, it had been left in unre- 
garded havoc of ruin ; the garden-gate still swung 
loose to its latch ; the garden, blighted utterly into a 
field of ashes, not even a weed taking root there ; the 
roof torn, . . . the shutters hanging about the 
windows in rags of rotten weed ; before its gate, the 
stream which had gladdened it now soaking slowly 
by, black as ebony, and thick with curdling scum ; 
the bank above it trodden into unctuous, sooty slime ; 
far in front of it, between it and the old hills, the 
furnaces of the city foaming forth perpetual plague 
of sulphurous darkness ; the volumes of their storm 
clouds coiling low over a waste of grassless fields." 

That is the circumstance of the designer at Rochdale ; 
and in such conditions fine design is impossible. This, 
on the other hand, is the circumstance of the great 
designer at Pisa : 



"the two paths" 139 

" On each side of a bright river he saw rise a line 
of brighter palaces, arched and pillared, and inlaid with 
deep red porphyry, and with serpentine ; along the 
quays, before their gates, were riding troops of knights, 
noble, in face and form, dazzling in crest and shield ; 
horse and man one labyrinth of quaint colour and 
gleaming light — the purple, and silver, and scarlet 
fringes flowing over the strong limbs and clashing 
mail like sea-waves over rocks at sunset. Opening 
on each side from the river were gardens, courts, and 
cloisters ; long successions of white pillars among 
wreaths of vine ; leaping of fountains through buds 
of pomegranate and orange ; and still along the gar- 
den-paths, and under and through the crimson of the 
pomegranate shadows, moving slowly, groups of the 
fairest women that Italy ever saw — fairest, because 
purest and thoughtfullest ; trained in all high knowledge, 
as in all courteous art — in dance, in song, in sweet 
wit, in lofty learning, in loftier courage, in loftiest love 
— able alike to cheer, to enchant or save, the souls 
of men. Above all this scenery of perfect human life, 
rose dome and bell-tower, burning with white alabaster 
and gold ; beyond dome and bell-tower the slopes of 
mighty hills, hoary with olive ; far in the north, above 
a purple sea of peaks of solemn Apennine, the clear, 
sharp-cloven Carrara mountains sent up their steadfast 
flowers of marble summit into amber sky; the great 
sea itself, scorching with expanse of light, stretching 
from their feet to the Gorgonian Isles ; and over all 
these, ever present, near or far — seen through the leaves 
of vine, or imaged with all its march of clouds in the 
Arno's stream, or set with its depth of blue close against 
the golden hair and burning cheek of lady or knight — 
that untroubled and sacred sky, which was to all men, 
in those days of innocent faith indeed the unquestioned 
abode of spirits, as the earth was of men, ... a 
heaven in which every cloud that passed was literally 



140 JOHN RUSKIN 

the chariot of an angel, and every ray of its Evening 
and Morning streamed from the throne of God." 



Over-rich, even for its purpose, is a phrase now and 
then ; but that sentence, " close against the golden 
hair and burning cheek . . . the untroubled and 
sacred sky," is purely beautiful. As to the signifi- 
cance of this contrast (for controversy must have it 
again), how are we to take it ? Here is Rochdale 
declared unable to design beautifully because of its 
internal and surrounding hideousness; India able to 
design beautifully, with vice, in the midst of beauty ; 
Pisa able to design beautifully in the midst of beauty, 
with virtue, according to this golden picture ; Scot- 
land unable to design beautifully, with virtue, in the 
midst of beauty. What is the lesson, finally ? And 
besides this general doubt as to what these several 
things have to prove to us, there is also a local 
question. I never stand under that untroubled and 
sacred sky but with a remembrance of a tower, long 
fallen, that filled a place in the sunny blue aloft. 
Many a space of the earth has been a site of the 
suffering of man -, but here is a space of the very sky 
that has been a site of human wrongs intolerable. 
Above, in that delicate air, was the upper chamber 
of the Tower of Famine ; high in that now vacant 
and serene space sounded the voice of Ugolino and 
his sons. Earth has everywhere her graves ; but no 
other sky than the Pisan sky holds such a place as 
this. 

The world — nature — is full of unanswerable ques- 



"THE TWO PATHS I4I 

tions. It was a courageous enterprise to answer one 
of them in this book — a great enterprise, a great de- 
feat. 

To small minds, and to the vulgar, the desire to 
reply to those perpetual questions is a matter of daily 
habit. They have no doubt as to two paths, or as 
to the destination of each, or the cause of its inclin- 
ing. But here, for once, is a great mind condemning 
itself to the disaster of judgment and decision, in its 
divine good faith. It is hardly credible that the in- 
tellectual martyrdom of the enterprise of writing The 
Two Paths should have been hailed with the laughter 
of the untroubled. So, nevertheless, it has been. 

Tragedy is not, says Hegel, in the conflict of right 
with wrong, but in the conflict of right with right. 
Ruskin was nobly reluctant to confess such a strife, 
or to be the spectator of such a battle. Hence he 
must declare two paths. But his own labour of the 
mind, his book, is, in the sense of Hegel, tragic. 

For a far better quality of splendid English than 
the descriptive passage above quoted, I would cite 
this from the lecture that urges upon architects their 
great vocation as sculptors : 

" Is there anything within range of sight, or con- 
ception, which may not be of use to you ? . . . 
Whatever may be conceived of Divine, or beheld of 
Human, may be dared or adopted by you ; through- 
out the kingdom of animal life, no creature is so vast, 
or so minute, that you cannot deal with it, or bring it 
into service ; the lion and the crocodile will couch 
about your shafts ; the moth and bee will sun them- 



142 JOHN RUSKIN 

selves upon your flowers ; for you, the fawn will leap ; 
for you, the snail will be slow ; for you, the dove 
smooth her bosom, and the hawk spread her wings 
towards the south. All the wide world of vegetation 
blooms and bends for you ; the leaves tremble that 
you may bid them be still under the marble snow ; the 
thorn and the thistle, which the earth casts forth as 
evil, are to you the kindliest servants ; no dying petal, 
nor drooping tendril, is so feeble as to have no help 
for you ; no robed pride of blossom so kingly, but it 
will lay aside its purple to receive at your hands its 
pale immortality." 

Again, Ruskin compares the interest of the geolo- 
gist, of the naturalist, with that of the sculptor, in 
the things they study. "7b« must get the storm- 
spirit into your eagles, and the lordliness into your 
lions." And again he shows the forms of lifeless 
things — the all but invisible shells that shall lend their 
shapes to the starred traceries of a cathedral roof, the 
torn cable that can twine into a perfect moulding : 
" You who can crown the mountain with its fortress, 
and the city with its towers, are thus able also to give 
beauty to ashes and worthiness to dust." He presses 
the example of the ancient architects : did they em- 
ploy a subordinate workman as sculptor, ordering of 
him " bishops at so much a mitre, and cripples at so 
much a crutch " ? Was the procession on the portal 
of Amiens wrought so ? 

Amongst the many sentences that in the course of 
all Ruskin's books correct his teaching that nothing 
in nature should be rejected are these : " A looking- 
glass does not design — it receives and communicates 



" THE TWO PATHS I43 

indiscriminately . . . ; a painter designs when he 
chooses some things, refuses others, and arranges all." 
And " Design, properly so called, is human invention, 
consulting human capacity " (a most admirable defi- 
nition). 

" Out of the infinite heap of things around us in 
the world, it chooses a certain number which it can 
thoroughly grasp, and presents this group to the spec- 
tator in the form best calculated to enable him to grasp 
it also, and to grasp it with delight." 

Japanese art was unconsidered at the time of the 
writing of these lectures. One may wonder how 
would the art, the people, their gentleness, their vices, 
their monstrous burlesque of human form, the distor- 
tion, the familiarity, the jeer, the mockery, the 
malice, the delicate and intent study of natural fact 
in plants and in birds, the vitality, and especially the 
love of innocent life, — how would the men and their 
art show under the intricate tests of The Two Paths? 
Where would Japan stand in that entanglement of 
India, Scotland, Rochdale, and Pisa ? 

The last lecture is on " The Work of Iron in Na- 
ture, Art, and Policy." The history of the colour of 
iron in the landscape is brilliant writing. The warn- 
ing against the foolish use of the word " freedom," 
and against the foolish enthusiasm for the vague idea, 
repeats what Ruskin has said often : " No human 
being, however great or powerful, was ever so free as 
a fish. There is always something that he must, or 
must not, do." 



144 JOHN RUSKIN 

" In these and all matters you never can reason 
finally from the abstraction, for both liberty and re- 
straint are good when they are nobly chosen, . . 
but of the two . . . it is restraint which char- 
acterises the higher creature, and betters the lower 
creature ; and, from the ministering of the archangel 
to the labour of the insect, — from the poising of the 
planets to the gravitation of a grain of dust, — the 
power and glory of all creatures, and all matter, con- 
sist in their obedience, not in their freedom." 



CHAPTER XIII 

"unto this last" (i860) 

" I rest satisfied with the work, though with noth- 
ing else that I have done," says John Ruskin in the 
preface to the first issue after the publication had been 
stopped in the Cornhill Magazine; and in 1888 he 
said that he would be content that all the rest of his 
books should be destroyed rather than this. The 
book was to give in plain English — " it has often 
been incidentally given in good Greek by Plato and 
Xenophon, and good Latin by Cicero and Horace " 
— a logical definition of wealth. The first paper, 
" The Roots of Honour," treats of the wages of 
labour, and at the outset relieves the reader of the 
usual burden of deciding whether the interests of em- 
ployer and labourer are alike or opposed. According 
to circumstances they may be either. But it is not 
to the chance of the harmony of interests, nor to the 
possible equity of opposition of interests — not to any 
chance whatever — that Ruskin would entrust the rate 
of wages. Unlike other writers on economy at that 
day, he thinks it possible that the rate of wages in 
industry and agriculture should be fixed by legislation, 
and fixed irrespectively of the demand for labour. 
Why has the possibility so long been denied, in face 
of the fact that for all important and some unimpor- 
tant labour, wages are so regulated — wages of the 

145 



146 JOHN RUSKIN 

prime minister, the bishop, the general, the cabman, 
the lawyer, the physician ? The difficulty as to good 
and bad work Ruskin decides thus — the good labourer 
would be employed and the bad would not ; but all 
employed should have the same wages. This, more- 
over, is done in the cases of the professions already 
named. A bad workman should not be permitted to 
offer his work at half-price, to the probable injury of 
the good ; it is his freedom to do so, and not regula- 
tion, that is artificial and unnatural. Education would 
continuously lessen the number of bad workmen. 
The second aim of true political economy, and a diffi- 
cult one, is to maintain employment steadily despite 
the " sudden and extensive inequalities of demand." 
But this difficulty, though great, would not be so 
great if the rushes and relaxations, overwork and 
idleness alternately, that come of unequal wages, 
were at an end. There would be a calming-down, 
and employment would become more equal. Further- 
more, the labourer might be taught to live and work 
more steadily, and therefore more evenly, by the 
counsel of a good employer. And the good employer 
would be a merchant (for example) who should accept 
his own function in the spirit of the lawyer, soldier, 
or pastor — should provide by commerce for the na- 
tion, as those administer law, defend, or teach, not 
seeking profit in the first place, but rendering in the 
first place the definite service of providing. 

The second paper, " The Veins of Wealth," draws 
the distinction between mercantile economy (as it 
actually is) and true political economy, the first being 



UNTO THIS LAST 



^47 



that rule of riches which implies poverty — that is, 
relative riches, the riches of individuals or classes ; 
whereas political economy is the order of riches of the 
nation, in harmony, not in internal contrasts. The 
art of becoming rich in the mercantile sense is the art 
of keeping others poor. Without their poverty, ob- 
viously, the successful man would have neither servants 
nor husbandmen at his disposal. " The establishment 
of the mercantile wealth which consists in a claim 
upon labour signifies a political diminution of the real 
wealth which consists in substantial possessions." 
That is, the man who has become poor, and thus in- 
debted in labour to the rich, has been unprofitable to 
the State. If the rich withdraws into idleness, he too 
becomes unprofitable to the State. The wealth of 
individuals may be gathered in masses, but whether 
for good or evil no one can tell by the mere fact of its 
existence. It tends to gather unequally; the obvious 
inequalities of health, character, and ability will have 
it so. But the sight of a class enriched ought not to 
beguile a student of economy to think he sees a nation 
rich. Nor must — so John Ruskin teaches — the in- 
equality be left to the exaggerations of the unregulated 
action of forces. The economists of i860 would have 
it that the course of demand and supply cannot be 
controlled by human laws. 

" Precisely in the same sense . . . the waters 
of the world go where they are required. Where the 
land falls the water flows. . . . But the disposition 
and administration . . . can be altered by human 
forethought." 



148 JOHN RUSKIN 

Ruskin then labours to find a rate of wages so just 
that legislation may approve and enforce it. 

" The abstract idea of just or due wages . . 
is that they will consist in a sum of money which will 
at any time procure for [the labourer] at least as much 
labour as he has given. . . . And this equity 
of payment is, observe, wholly independent 
of any reference to the number of men who are will- 
ing to do the work." 

The smith who gives his skill and a quarter of an 
hour of his life to forging a horse-shoe has a right to 
a quarter of an hour of equal life and skill, at least, in 
payment, when he needs it. Then comes the difficulty 
of translating this into the kinds of payment the smith 
will actually desire. But Ruskin believes that the 
discovery of the right representation of exchange is no 
more difficult than that of the " maxima and minima 
of the vulgar economist " ; the cheapest market in 
which the vulgar economists recommend a man to buy 
and the dearest in which they advise him to sell have 
to be groped for, surely, by hard measures. (How 
right Ruskin is when he says that commercial riches 
implies poverty is proved by this once respected maxim. 
The vaunted wealth was not and never could be 
" political " ; for there was necessarily a man selling 
in the cheapest market and buying in the dearest at 
every " operation " of the " principle " — the principle ! 
— " Buy in the cheapest," &c.) In brief, a just man 
approaches the just price, as an unjust approaches his 
" cheapest " and " dearest " markets. Nay, the just 



" UNTO THIS LAST " I49 

man comes easily nearer to the object of his search ; 
or it would be better to say that there is something for 
him to come at, whereas the commercial economist 
touches ground nowhere. 

" It is easier to determine scientifically what a man 
ought to have for his work than what his necessities 
will compel him to take for it. His necessities can 
only be ascertained by empirical, but his due by ana- 
lytical, investigation." 

Neither the just nor the unjust hirer employs two 
men where only one man is needed. But in the just 
case the hired labourer may be able to hire, for his 
own necessities, another workman by the purchase of 
what he needs ; and the influence of this ability passes 
on through all the kinds and grades of labour. Ruskin's 
system would tend to send wealth flowing. It was, 
needless to say, accused of socialism, to which he 
answers, not very profoundly but profoundly enough 
for the purpose : " Whether socialism has made more 
progress among the army and navy (where payment is 
made on my principles) or among the manufacturing 
operatives (who are paid on my opponents' principles) 
I leave it to those opponents to ascertain." He rec- 
ognises as no other has done " the impossibility of 
equality." He had said in Modern Painters^ " Govern- 
ment and Co-operation are . . . the Laws of 
Life; Anarchy and Competition the Laws of Death." 
A modern reader may wonder that Ruskin should, in 
replying to a charge of socialism, defend himself by 
the strange means of a denunciation of anarchy. 



150 JOHN RUSKIN 

Anarchy and Socialism are the two poles of political 
principle, as we know now that the words are better 
defined; yet even to-day the two opposites are con- 
fused in daily speech. The truth is that Ruskin's 
system is highly socialistic because it is opposed to 
anarchy and to the licence of irresponsible force's such 
as competition. But his meaning is not at all con- 
fused, although in this one instance his diction is 
so. 

To this essay there are two important notes ; one 
announcing Ruskin as a complete Free-trader, despite 
his perception of the false grounds on which the pub- 
lic of that day believed in Free trade ; and another 
suggesting that human passion might enter into the 
calculations of science as justly as the " mere thought " 
to the importance whereof Mill confessed that he 
could set no limit, " even in a purely productive and 
material point of view." Mill even assigns a certain 
action to "feelings," but only to those "of a disa- 
greeable kind," as discouragements of labour. Ruskin 
would permit feelings " of an agreeable kind " to have 
their turn. 

The fourth and last essay, " Ad Valorem," deals 
with the search, above-indicated, of " the equivalent " 
— the payment that would represent, in the hands of 
the labourer, his right to the labour of another. Rus- 
kin, in this research, defines Value, Wealth, Price, 
and Produce. I confess I do not think him to be fair 
either to Mill or to his own argument when he with- 
ers that writer for his saying that political economy 
has nothing to do with" the estimate of the moralist." 



"unto this last" 151 

Mill might justly say this of a science, and yet be 
willing that the science should be overruled. The 
economist's business is to demonstrate the laws of 
wealth and their working, and if this were done scien- 
tifically Ruskin would have no ground of opposition. 
But, on the other hand, he has legitimate ground in 
his contention that Mill is unscientific, because it is 
unscientific to make no calculation of human feeling 
except feeling " of a disagreeable kind." Into that 
contention, however, I do not see that moral indigna- 
tion should enter, albeit intellectual irritation may. It 
is not Ruskin's anger that replies pat to Mill's error, 
but Ruskin's detection, declared in this sentence : 
" The only conclusions of his which I have to dispute 
are those which follow from his premises." For he 
found that Mill covertly introduced the " moral esti- 
mate " he professed to exclude. It is much to the 
purpose also to expose Mill's definition : " Wealth 
consists of all useful and agreeable objects which 
possess exchangeable value." Usefulness cannot — 
agreeableness certainly cannot — be separated from 
human passion. " Therefore," Ruskin says, " polit- 
ical economy, being a science of wealth, must be a 
science respecting human capacities and dispositions." 
A " definition " of Ricardo's he shows to be a strange 
misfit indeed ; and a plain reader wishes Cobbett were 
there to trip, entangle, and fell Ricardo in his abomi- 
nable pronouns : " Utility is not the measure of ex- 
changeable value, though it is absolutely essential to 
it." In making his own definition of value Ruskin 
does admirable work in words. He reminds us of the 



152 JOHN RUSKIN 

nominative of valorem and of its reference to health 
and, in the original sense, to virtue : 

" A truly valuable thing is that which leads to life. 
. . In proportion as it does not lead to life, or 
as its strength is broken, it is less valuable ; in pro- 
portion as it leads away from life, it is invaluable." 

This value is independent of opinion, and of quan- 
tity. Here we get back, as in every one of Ruskin's 
books, to that absolute good that Carlyle warned us 
not to doubt at our peril. Within all Ruskin's 
science, all his art, all his sight, and all his thought 
stands this : 

*' The real science of political economy, which has 
yet to be distinguished from the bastard science, as 
medicine from witchcraft, ... is that which 
teaches nations to desire and labour for the things that 
lead to life." 

It is to teach them to destroy things that lead to 
destruction, and to forsake indifferent things that do 
negative evil. Ruskin then defines " wealth " or 
" having," adding to Mill's definition : " To be 
wealthy is to have a large stock of useful articles," 
the not unnecessary words, " which we can use," and 
thus bringing in once again the human power and the 
human heart. "Wealth," he says, "instead of de- 
pending merely on a ' have,' is thus seen to depend on 
a 'can.' Gladiator's death, on a ' habet ' ; but sol- 
dier's victory, and state's salvation, on a ' quo pluri- 
mum posset.' " " Wealth ... is the possession 



" UNTO THIS LAST ' 



153 



of the valuable by the valiant." As to price, he 
teaches that in as much as it is exchange value, it has 
nothing to do with profit. It is only in labour 
there can be profit, or advance. The processes of 
exchange, in so far as they are laborious, may bear 
profit, as involved in the labours of production ; but 
the pure exchange is absolute exchange and nothing 
more. Acquisition there is in mercantile exchange, 
but the word profit should represent increase such as 
that of the workshop and the field. Profit is of " po- 
litical," acquisition of " mercantile," importance ; ac- 
quisition makes poor by the same act as it makes 
rich. The making rich is conspicuous, and the mak- 
ing poor is obscure, but none the less real because it 
is obscure, of the back-street, and finally of the grave ; 
nothing is more obscure in this world. Ruskin holds 
the science of acquisition to be the one science that 
is " founded on nescience, and an art founded on art- 
lessness." All other arts and sciences, except this, 
" have for their object the doing away with their op- 
posite nescience and artlessness." This alone needs 
the existence of the ignorance and helplessness 
whereby its knowledge and power may work. 

" The general law, then, respecting just or econom- 
ical exchange, is simply this : There must be advan- 
tage on both sides (or if only advantage on one, at 
least no disadvantage on the other), . . . and 
just payment for his time, intelligence, and labour to 
any intermediate person effecting the transaction. 
And whatever advantage there is on either 
side, and whatever pay is given to the intermediate 



154 JOHN RUSKIN 

person, should be thoroughly known. All attempt at 
concealment implies some practice of the opposite, or 
undivine, science, founded on nescience." 

What we wish for is to be reckoned with amongst 
our gettings, as well as what we need. We wish for 
romantic things, and ideal ; " and the regulation of 
the purse is, in its essence, regulation of the imagina- 
tion and the heart." Phenomena of price are there- 
fore extremely complex, but price is to be calculated 
finally in labour, and Ruskin goes on to define the na- 
ture of that standard. "The price of other things 
must always be counted by the quantity of labour; 
not the price of labour by the quantity of other 
things." And this is well illustrated by an instance 
too long to quote. To this section belongs the sin- 
gularly interesting sentence on consumption as the 
end, crown, and perfection of production. Ruskin 
and Mill agree mainly in regard to the impoverishing 
political effect of the consumption of the unproductive 
classes and of the vain or vicious consumption of the 
productive classes ; but pure consumption Mill in- 
clines to treat as though there were, at any rate, no 
good in it, whereas Ruskin declares it to be in itself 
good. I own that Mill seems to me on this point 
more logical ; that Ruskin's estimate is rather of the 
joy and happiness whereof consumption is the cost 
than of consumption itself; and that it is scientific to 
treat consumption as loss— necessary loss or unneces- 
sary — but still loss. Obviously if men could live for 
a generation without food all granaries might over- 
flow ; and eating gives pleasure, but the pleasure does 



"UNTO THIS last" 1 55 

not consist in eating as an act of destruction. Ruskin, 
however, seems to speak more indisputably wiien he 
declares all wealth to be measured by this human ca- 
pacity of consumption, and shows good measures of 
consumption to be as worthy of an economist's study 
as good measures of production. He next opposes 
Mill's assertion that "A demand for commodities is 
not a demand for labour." It is one of the knotty 
points. Near this follows a fine passage on wars of 
capitalists and on the taxing of future generations. 

In a word, the book is part of the perpetual plea 
of righteousness against blind self-interest, and the 
plea is scientific. It closes with some pages beautiful 
beyond praise, and full of the dignity of confidence 
in unalterable facts. Whilst man lives by bread, by 
the very wheat and the flocks, the sacred necessities 
of his body — of his mouth — will be the moderate 
measure of his common and daily wealth. 

" All England may, if it chooses, become one man- 
ufacturing town ; and Englishmen, sacrificing them- 
selves to the good of general humanity, may live 
diminished lives in the midst of noise, of darkness, 
and of deadly exhalation. But the world cannot be- 
come a factory or a mine. . . . Neither the av- 
arice nor the rage of men will ever feed them. . . 
So long as men live by bread, the far away valleys 
must laugh as they are covered with the gold of God, 
and the shouts of His happy multitudes ring round 
the winepress and the well." 

Then he consoles the mere sentimentalist, who 
might fear that the tilled country, peopled one day 



156 JOHN RUSKIN 

with its natural inheritors, would lose its beauty. Not 
so, Ruskin says ; let the desert have its own place, but 
the soil is " loveliest in habitation. . . . The de- 
sire of the heart is also the desire of the eyes." In 
this he proves his conversion from the young passion 
of Modern Painters for solitudes and its contempt of 
potato-patches. He ends : 

" Not greater wealth, but simpler pleasure. 
Waste nothing, and grudge nothing. Care in nowise 
to make more of money, but care to make much of 
it ; remembering always the great, palpable, inevitable 
fact — that what one person has, another cannot have. 
And if, on due and honest thought over these 
things, it seems that the kind of existence to which 
men are now summoned by every plea of pity and 
claim of right, may, for some time at least, not be a 
luxurious one ; — consider whether, even supposing it 
guiltless, luxury could be desired by any of us, if we 
saw clearly at our sides the suffering which accom- 
panies it in the world. . . . The crudest man 
living could not sit at his feast, unless he sat blindfold. 
Raise the veil boldly ; face the light ; and if, as yet, 
the light of the eye can only be through tears, and the 
light of the body through sackcloth, go thou forth 
weeping, bearing precious seed." 

How did the world hear this appeal ? It replied 
with a laugh. Was, then, the argument of the book 
so hollow that the first comer could refute it ? Was 
the feeling of the book so small that the first comer 
might deride it ? John Ruskin was bidden to go back 
to his art-criticism. Thackeray stopped the papers in 
the Cornhill. The unsold copies of the reissue re- 



"UNTO THIS LAST 157 

mained on the publisher's hands. Munera Pulveris^ 
a more technical work on economy, was equally un- 
acceptable in the pages of Erasers Maga'zine. 

And now, after forty years, " the living wage " is 
but another name for Ruskin's fixity of payments. 
The old-age pensions of to-day or to-morrow are of 
his proposal ; so are technical and elementary educa- 
tion by the State ; government workshops \ fair rents ; 
fixity of tenure ; compensation for improvements ; 
compulsory powers of allotment ; the preservation of 
commons ; municipal recognition of trades-union rates 
of wages ; all are, or are to be, rehearsals of measures 
suggested by him, in this book or elsewhere, to the 
legislature. Private undertakings have followed him 
no less in the building and regulation of houses for 
the poor. 



CHAPTER XIV 

"sesame and lilies" (1864-1869) 

This also was a work solemnly presented. Ruskin 
took it for the initial volume of the revised series 
of his writings, furnished it with a new preface, and 
added to the two lectures a third, which every atten- 
tive reader must hold to be amongst the most mo- 
mentous of the expressions of his mind. It is not 
surprising, to one who has recognised in the book a 
supreme value, to find that in the later preface its 
author declares it to contain the best of many state- 
ments of his purpose. In the same pages he takes 
occasion to present himself to those whose confidence 
he asks : 

" Not an unjust person ; not an unkind one -, a lover 
of order, labour, and peace. That, it seems to me, 
is enough to give me right to say all I care to say 
on ethical subjects ; more, I could only tell definitely 
through details of autobiography such as none but pros- 
perous and (in the simple sense of the word) faultless 
lives could justify ; and mine has been neither. Yet if 
any one, skilled in reading the torn manuscripts of the 
human soul, cares for more intimate knowledge of me, 
he may have it by knowing with what persons in past 
history I have most sympathy. 

" I will name three. 

" In all that is strongest and deepest in me, that fits 
me for my work, and gives light or shadow to my be- 
ing, I have sympathy with Guido Guinicelli. 
158 



"sesame and lilies 159 

" In my constant natural temper, and thoughts of 
things and people, with Marmontel. 

" In my enforced and accidental temper, and 
thoughts of things and people, with Dean Swift." 

The first lecture — " Sesame : of Kings' Treasuries " 
— is chiefly a plea for accessible libraries. Its demands 
have been fullfilled in part, and as far as public 
authority had office and function in the matter. But 
in part also the urgent counsel of the lecture has 
been absolutely contemned ; for it represented to the 
hearers that inasmuch as life is very short, " and the 
quiet hours of it few," it is well to waste none of 
them in reading worthless books. Public libraries are 
increasing — not entirely in the sense in which Ruskin 
intended to commend them ; for he wished English- 
men to be rather able to buy good books securely 
than to read them free of cost ; yet in a very real 
sense treasuries have been stored for the use of the 
" quiet hours " of citizens. But it is evident that 
more of the quiet hours of this short life are wasted 
now in reading worthless books than when the re- 
monstrance was spoken. The private following of 
Ruskin's teaching, however diligent it may have been 
with a few, separate and single, has been as nothing 
amongst the multitude of units. Corporately in munic- 
ipal action, and obscurely in the practice of two or 
three — not joined together, but scattered out of sight 
— *' Sesame" had its share of influence ; but its appeal 
was to the private throng, thousands and millions, 
whose conduct of life is matter of their own mul- 
titudinous but solitary responsibility. And in this 



l60 JOHN RUSKIN 

matter of idle reading, general opinion grows daily 
more relaxed. Ruslcin would teach men to read ; 
and from this long instruction, in which not a sen- 
tence is futile, I gather first the rebuke of that 
common appreciation, " How good this is — that's ex- 
actly what I think ! " The right feeling is rather, 
" How strange that is ! I never thought of that 
before, and yet I see it is true ; or if I do not 
now, I hope I shall, some day." This is asking 
perhaps overmuch submission ; and assuredly litera- 
ture is a question, a recognition, a consultation, an 
evocation to the reader's spirit. // poeta mi disse : 
Che pense F And what Virgil asked of his student, 
Dante, every poet asks of a young man. But Ruskin 
says, " Be sure that you go to the author to get at 
his meaning, not to find yours " ; and that doubtless 
is the first step. Next the reader is bidden to look 
intently at words and to know their history. " Let 
the accent of words be watched, and closely : let 
their meaning be watched more closely still, and 
fewer will do the work. . . . There are masked 
words droning and skulking about us in Europe just 
now." How excellent a phrase ! Ruskin is not of 
those who think English to be a fortunate language 
in that it has words of Greek and Latin derivation 
for august and awful things. He would have us 
transpose what we have so arbitrarily placed — "damn " 
and " condemn " by popular use, for example, and 
" Bible " and " book " by derivation. Nevertheless 
there might be much to be said on the other side. 
Quote the French Scriptures, in words that do journey- 



"sesame and lilies" i6i 

man's work — nay, worse, commercial work — in daily 
life, and see the loss. The world acquires and pos- 
sesses a greater number of things — spiritual things — 
as it grows older ; nobler its possessions may not be, 
but they are certainly more numerous ; and England, 
among the nations of the world, is happy in the fact 
that she is able, better than the rest, to multiply 
names for these things by her power of giving to 
one word two forms. Has not Ruskin himself been 
able to think more remotely and more intellectually 
by means of the removed and immaterial Latin word 
of what he calls our " mongrel tongue " ? No imag- 
inative reader, however, and no reader who knows 
anything of Ruskin, will need to be told that when 
he would have us to counterchange " Bible " and 
" book," or any such words, he would add to the 
gravity of this word, not take away from the gravity 
of that. But no reader who knows anything of the 
world will need to be told that in effect the counter- 
change would add nothing to the gravity of one 
word and would take much from the gravity of the 
other. 

As a lesson in the intent study of words, such as a 
great poet claims from his reader by his own weight 
of special purpose — the single stroke struck with 
single intention — Ruskin takes his hearers through the 
St. Peter passage of Lycidas. Every word has full 
audience, and makes an ample discharge of Milton's 
meaning at the assize of this solicitous judge. Nor 
may we complain that such separate audience re- 
sembles the judgment of one who would take a lens 



l62 JOHN RUSKIN 

to look at a picture piecemeal. The particular verbal 
examination is entirely right, it answers immediately 
to a special claim of the poet in a special passage ; 
anon he will relax his demands, and you the instance 
of your attention. And so does Holbein draw finely, 
intensely, and much^ some passage of anatomical 
articulation, and then pass to a larger and slighter 
drawing of the laxer forms of flesh. 

But the mournful point of this lecture on reading 
is that after all it is a lecture against reading. The 
lecturer himself must not follow his proper vocation 
— chiefly, he has said elsewhere, the outlining of 
primroses; because no savages are housed so ill as 
the poor of English towns, or die so lonely ; and no 
man nor woman ought to follow the vocation of art 
or study until the lost were rescued and the names 
of the unknown written in a register open under the 
eyes of a responsible compassion. And even if it 
were fit that the arts should engross the human energy 
that is due to the tasks of succour, how should a 
covetous people read aright ? With the love of 
money publicly confessed to be the motive of all 
action, the insanity of avarice is broadcast, and the 
insane are incapable of thought. 

" Happily our disease is, as yet, little worse than 
this incapacity of thought, . . . we are still in- 
dustrious to the last hour of the day, though we add 
the gambler's fury to the labourer's patience ; we are 
still brave to the death, though incapable of discern- 
ing the true cause for battle ; and are still true in af- 
fection to our own flesh. . . . There is hope for 



"sesame and lilies" 163 

a nation while this can still be said of it. As long as it 
holds its life in its hand, ready to give it for its honour 
(though a foolish honour), for its love (though a selfish 
love), and for its business (though a base business), 
there is hope for it. But hope only ; for this instinc- 
tive, reckless virtue cannot last." 

On the last page, after the evil of privilege has 
been shown fully, broadly, and with the most im- 
petuous will, the problem of privilege is touched 
where it lies, known to all men, awaiting some solu- 
tion in the future, not always to make matter for the 
last of seventy pages : 

" The principal question remains inexorable, — 
. . , which of us, in brief word, is to do the 
hard and dirty work for the rest — and for what pay ? 
Who is to do the pleasant and clean work, and for 
what pay ? . . . We live, we gentlemen, on 
delicatest prey, after the manner of weasels ; . . . 
we keep a certain number of clowns digging and 
ditching, and generally stupefied, in order that we, 
being fed gratis, may have all the thinking and feel- 
ing to ourselves. . . . Yet . . . it is per- 
haps better to build a beautiful human creature than a 
beautiful dome or steeple, . . . only the beauti- 
ful human creature will have some duties to do in re- 
turn." 

It is of these duties that the second lecture, "Of 
Queens' Gardens," treats with singular beauty. The 
foregoing pages of the book as it stands had assuredly 
cast not only sudden lights upon the evil but Mack 
shadows upon the good of modern English life. Not 
a word, for instance, of the vast alms, of the private 



164 JOHN RUSKIN 

and voluntary but corporate service rendered to all 
kinds of distress, of the great socialistic confession 
of the theory of the Poor Law ; not a word of any 
business that is not " base " or of any love that is not 
" selfish." But in " Lilies " the teaching is addressed 
particularly to women of a kind and class that ac- 
knowledge conscience and are concerned with private 
duty, though they can hardly be charged with an in- 
tellectual responsibility for the national condition. 
In effect, the examples proposed to them by Ruskin 
are those of heroines who have never questioned the 
privilege — moral, mental, bodily — into which they 
were born. Nor have the women addressed inquired 
into the conditions of their own privilege, even 
though they may vaguely avow that some obligations 
are implied by their unexplained " rights." In ad- 
dressing women at all Ruskin tells us he had recourse 
to " faith " ; it was a faith that could boast of no 
great foundation : 

" I wrote ' Lilies ' to please one girl ; and were it 
not for what I remember of her, and of few besides, 
should now recast some of the sentences. . . 
The fashion of the time renders whatever is forward, 
coarse, or senseless, in feminine nature, too palpable 
to all men." 

The " one girl " was the " Rosie " of Praterita^ 
whom, child and woman, he had loved, and who was 
dead (1875) when he revised the pages written for 
her. As to the audience then left to him, he says 
that the picturesqueness of his earlier writings " had 



"sesame and lilies" 165 

brought him acquainted with much of their emptiest 
enthusiasms " ; and as to the failure of women in re- 
lation to his own life, "What I might have been so 
helped " [that is, helped by a woman] " I rarely in- 
dulge myself in the idleness of thinking." 

He proposes examples of heroic nature, and the 
entirely heroic nature of the women of Shakespeare 
all worthy young readers will grant to Ruskin's lovely 
exposition. But they will assuredly boggle at a like 
ascription of honour to the women of Scott. These 
young creatures Scott made virtuous because conven- 
tion required a virtuous maid for the hero to love, and 
made faultless, at a blow, because he could not be at 
the pains to work upon their characters. It is chilling 
to hear their intellect and tenderness praised in the 
noble terms that honour the intellect and tenderness 
of Imogen, Hermione, or Perdita, of a goddess, or of 
the fairy women of romance : " I would take 
Spenser, and show you how all his fairy knights are 
sometimes deceived and sometimes vanquished ; but 
the soul of Una is never darkened, and the spear of 
Britomart is never broken." — "That Athena of the 
olive-helm and cloudy shield, to faith in whom you 
owe, down to this date, whatever you hold most 
precious in art, in literature, or in types of national 
virtue." 

As for the education of the girl who is in England 
born into the inheritance of the privilege of what is — 
while the disinherited consent — her own place, Ruskin 
counsels what perhaps no one will question. She is to 
be trained in habits of accurate thought ; she is to 



1 66 JOHN RUSKIN 

understand the meaning, the inevitableness, and the 
loveliness of natural laws ; and to " follow at least 
some one path of scientific attainment as far as to the 
threshold of that bitter Valley of Humiliation into 
which only the wisest and bravest of men can de- 
scend, owning themselves for ever children, gathering 
pebbles on a boundless shore." To the girl herself 
Ruskin makes a passionate appeal. To no one, to 
no class, has he spoken words more urgent, more 
hardly wmnp^om his profound distress and desire on 
behalf of mankind. The criminal is beyond reach, 
in the grip of circumstance and of passion ; the 
political economist is, according to Ruskin, teaching 
his own different lesson ; the soldier is under another 
obedience ; the man is indocile. But here, in the 
nation, is the girl, for a score of reasons accessible 
and profitable. Against her sins there is no legisla- 
tion, against her destructiveness no national protest, 
no public opinion against her cruelty. In Sesame 
and Lilies she learns that she must not be cruel, and 
that she must not be idle — that her idleness cannot 
but be cruel ; at her disposal is the awful force of the 
negation of good. He, who does not wonder at the 
death of the miser, at the life of the sensualist, at the 
frenzy of nations, at the crimes of kings, does wonder 
at the lack of mercy in the heart of a fortunate 
woman. He would persuade her to make garments 
for the poor and to give alms, not to eat her bread in 
idleness, not to waste it ; to live and care for no 
flowers until she shall have rescued the withering 
flowers of miserable childhood : 



"sesame and lilies" 167 

" Did you ever hear, not of a Maud but a Made- 
leine, who went down to her garden in the dawn, and 
found One waiting at the gate, whom she supposed 
to be the gardener ? " 

The third and last lecture bound in this volume — 
" The Mystery of Life and its Arts," delivered in 
Dublin in 1868 — has near its opening this passage : 

" I have had what, in many respects, I boldly call 
the misfortune, to set my words somewhat prettily to- 
gether ; not without a foolish vanity in the poor knack 
I had of doing so ; until I was heavily punished for 
this pride, by finding that many people thought of the 
words only, and cared nothing for the meaning." 

A little further is this : 

" I spent the ten strongest years of my life (from 
twenty to thirty) in endeavouring to show the excel- 
lence of the work of the man whom I believed, and 
rightly believed, to be the greatest painter of the 
schools of England since Reynolds, I had then per- 
fect faith in the power of every great truth or beauty 
to prevail ultimately. . . . Fortunately or un- 
fortunately, an opportunity of perfect trial undeceived 
me at once and forever." 

Ruskin found that the Turner drawings arranged by 
him for exhibition were the object of absolute public 
neglect. He saw that his ten years had been lost. 

" For that I did not much care ; I had, at least, 
learned my own business thoroughly. . . . But 
what I did "care for was the — to me frightful — dis- 
covery, that the most splendid genius in the arts 



l68 JOHN RUSKIN 

might be permitted by Providence to labour and 

perish uselessly, . . . that the glory of it was 

perishable as well as invisible. That was the first 
mystery of life to me." 

The reader will remember that Turner's pictures were 
not only neglected by men, but also irreparably injured 
and altered by time ; to witness this was to endure the 
chastisement of a hope whereof few men are capable. 
Surely it is no obscure sign of greatness in a soul — 
that it should have hoped so much. Ninety and 
nine are they who need no repentance, having not 
committed the sin of going thus in front of the 
judgments of Heaven — heralds — and have not been 
called back to rebuke as was this one. In what has 
so often been called the dogmatism of Ruskin's work 
appears this all-noble fault. 

Upon the discovery of this mystery crowd all the 
mysteries. Who that has suffered one but has also 
soon suffered all ? In this great lecture Ruskin con- 
fesses them one by one, in extremities of soul. And 
he is aghast at the indifference not of the vulgar only, 
but of poets. The seers themselves have paltered 
with the faculty of sight. Milton's history of the 
fall of the angels is unbelievable to himself, told with 
artifice and invention, not a living truth presented to 
living faith, nor told as he must answer it in the last 
judgment of the intellectual conscience. 

" Dante's conception is far more intense, and by 
himself for the time, not to be escaped from ; it is in- 
deed a vision, but a vision only. . . . And the 
destinies of the Christian Church, under their most 



"sesame and lilies" 169 

sacred symbols, become literally subordinate to the 
praise, and are only to be understood by the aid, of 
one dear Florentine maiden. ... It seems daily 
more amazing to me that men such as these should 
dare to . . . fill the openings of eternity, before 
which prophets have veiled their faces, . 
with idle puppets of their scholastic imagination, and 
melancholy lights of frantic faith in their lost mortal 
love." 

The indifference of the world as to the infinite 
question of religion, the indifference of all mankind 
as to the purpose of its little life, of every man as to 
the effect of his little life — in an evil hour these 
puzzles throng the way to the recesses of thought. 
As it chanced, with the irony of things, Ruskin had 
been bidden to avoid religious questions in Dublin for 
fear of offending some of his hearers. What he had 
been moved to say, however, he thought would offend 
all if it offended any, and not in Dublin only but in 
the breadth and in the corners of the world. But as 
his audience expected to hear about " art," and not 
about the mysteries of life, he closes the lecture in 
his old manner, with all the splendid confidence of 
teaching, demonstrating the cause of the good fortune 
of this art and of the disaster of that, putting away 
once more what he confessed to be the unanswerable, 
for the exposition of what he held to be the answer- 
able, question. In a delightful passage (what wonder 
that his hearers wanted to hear it ?) he recurs to the 
contrast of the Lombardic Eve — the barbarous carving 
that had a future, with the Angel (it was an Irish 
angel, by the way), the barbarous design that had no 



170 JOHN RUSK.IN 

possible artistic future and was the end of its own 
futile attempt ; these had been described in The Two 
Paths. Here is Raskin leaving the Mystery for the 
lesson. But, strange to say, if ever he has explained 
in vain, registered an inconsequence, committed him- 
self to failure, it has been in the generous cause of 
possible rescue — it has been in the Lesson. 



CHAPTER XV 

"the crown of wild olive" (1866) 

Whether the four lectures published under this 
title chanced to be written at a time of interior weak- 
ness I know not ; but at least two of them bear such 
signs of flagging life as are not to be found elsewhere. 
Alike in gentleness, in play, in gravity, and in violence 
— in exaggeration itself, which wastes the life of all 
other writers — Ruskin has an incomparable vitality ; 
and it is not too much to say that, amongst these 
many books, only in the lecture on "War" is the 
place of this vitality taken by vivacity and excite- 
ment ; but the following lecture, " The Future of 
England," seems also to show signs of the spur. 
Both lectures were given at Woolwich — the one at 
the Royal Military Academy, and the other at the 
Royal Artillery Institution, with four years between. 
Ruskin had been asked, not once or twice, to speak 
to the young soldier, and had " not ventured persist- 
ently to refuse " ; and perhaps the knowledge that he 
had a paradox before him caused him to make the 
paradox a sort of impossibility, in very despair. Ac- 
cordingly we have it : " All the pure and noble arts 
of peace are founded on war " ; " No great art ever 
yet arose on earth, but among a nation of soldiers " ; 
" There is no art among a shepherd people, if it re- 
mains at peace " ; " There is no great art possible to 

171 



172 JOHN RUSKIN 

a nation but that which is based on battle." The 
reader is almost able to imagine for himself how Rus- 
kin opposes these assertions by condemnations of the 
contentious temper of man who, set to dress and to 
keep his garden, delighted to trample it in quarrel. 
The opposition is violent enough, but there is, for 
once, a lack of passion. Not so when war ceases to 
be directly the theme, and Ruskin approaches once 
more the intricate but more accessible question of 
public economy : 

"You object, Lords of England, to increase, to the 
poor, the wages you give them, because they spend 
them, you say, unadvisedly. Render them, therefore, 
an account of the wages which they give you; and 
show them, by your example, how to spend theirs to 
the last farthing, advisedly." 

He had just then heard of working men who spent 
their wages in the brief time of prosperity " by sitting 
two days a-week in the tavern parlour, ladling port 
wine, not out of bowls, but out of buckets " ; and he 
remembered the example set to them at his own first 
college supper. 

The two other lectures are on " Work " and 
" Traffic," and the first was for a Working Men's 
Institute. The main matter treated is the appoint- 
ment made by capital of the kind and the object of 
labour. No other operation of capital — not even the 
paying of wages — is so momentous as this for the in- 
terests of the labouring class ; Ruskin accuses the 
writers on political economy of neglecting its impor- 



"the crown of wild olive 173 

tance, but I think that Mill has sufficiently marked 
it, in his own way. The difference between Ruskin 
and the others is probably that he sees waste, inutility, 
and mischief where others, beguiled of their clear per- 
ceptions by commercial (or non-political) economy, 
were not aware of it : in iron railings, for example, 
set up before a new public-house : 

"The front of it was built in so wise manner, that 
a recess of two feet was left below its front windows, 
between them and the street-pavement ; a recess too 
narrow for any possible use (for even if it had been 
occupied by a seat, as in old time it might have been, 
everybody walking along the street would have fallen 
over the legs of the reposing wayfarer). But, by way 
of making this two feet depth of freehold land more 
expressive of the dignity of an establishment for the 
sale of spirituous liquors, it was fenced from the pave- 
ment by an imposing iron railing, having four or five 
spear-heads to the yard of it, and six feet high ; con- 
taining as much iron and iron-work, indeed, as could 
well be put into the space ; and by this stately ar- 
rangement, the little piece of dead ground within 
. . . became a protective receptacle of refuse." 

It was only Ruskin who saw this work to be im- 
poverishing ; and hard by this Croydon railing was 
the once sweet stream at Carshalton, full of festering 
refuse that a little natural labour would have cleared. 
Food, fresh air, and pure water brought about by 
labour are so much gain to the nation — a political 
possession — even if the labour spent on them be ill 
paid. 

The lecture on " Traffic " was given in the Brad- 



174 JOHN RUSKIN 

ford Town Hall on the eve of the building of a new 
Exchange. " I do not care about this Exchange," 
said the lecturer, " because you don't." 

" You know there are a great many odd styles of 
architecture about ; you don't want to do anything 
ridiculous; you hear of me, among others, as a re- 
spectable architectural man-milliner, and you send for 
me." 

His hope was to teach his hearers to like some- 
thing, and to build what they could like. " The first 
and last, and closest trial question to any living crea- 
ture is ' What do you like V . . . Taste is not 
only a part and an index of morality ; — it is the only 
morality." 



CHAPTER XVI 

"time and tide by weare and tyne" (1867) 

The years 1866 and 1867 are famous in the history 
of self-government in England. The agitator and the 
legislator, this party and that, vied amongst themselves 
for a place not in the vanward and the rearward, but 
both in the vanu^ard. Democracy gained ground that 
would not have been yielded to it without the slight 
quibble of altered names. At any rate it was in 1866 
that the two parties began to intersect one another at 
various points, and the intersections took names. The 
great two parties of political history were virtually 
confusible ; somewhat like the little animals, one im- 
placental and the other placental, and therefore derived 
by descent through ways that lay apart for incalculable 
years, yet so like each other in shape, habit, and feature 
that to see them run in the fields you cannot tell them 
apart. Everything then became technically political ; 
politics became a matter not of principle but of termi- 
nology ; and amid the arbitrary passion about words, 
Ruskin wrote his twenty-five letters to a workingman 
of Sunderland on the Laws of Work, to which he 
gave the aforesaid title, and which were intended to 
teach realities. Ruskin himself at times used the 
names of parties, calling himself a Tory or what not. 
But the writer of Time and Tide is one who warns 
Tory and Radical alike against the illusion of outward 

175 



176 JOHN RUSKIN 

liberty, and enforces the necessity of inward law first, 
and of outward law secondly, to execute the first. 
Freedom from covetousness, freedom from luxury, 
protection from cruelty — Ruskin would ensure these 
with so much force that standing somewhere between 
the extremity of socialism on the one hand and the 
extremity of anarchism on the other, it would certainly 
be to socialists that he would seem to be gathered. 
Nevertheless, though the socialist might quote Tifne 
and Tide in favour of licences to marry, yet the 
anarchist might cite the same book against the army 
estimates. 

It is in this little volume, written when men — at a 
time of political revision — were not ashamed to make 
fresh plans (called Utopias in the language of the 
newspaper) for society, that Ruskin has given himself 
the greatest freedom of proposal. That is, he takes, 
for all his sad heart, something of the pleasure of a 
child planning the laws and economies of its own 
island in the Pacific Ocean. There is an ingenious 
interest in the work, and withal a profound conviction 
of the wisdom of what seems so visionary. It is 
needless to say that a proposal to give young men and 
rosieres a licence to marry when they deserved it re- 
ceived from the world the derision that costs nothing 
— not even the pains of reading the book. The book, 
indeed, is full rather of desires than of hopes, and its 
dejection is almost as great as that manifest in the 
most decoratively beautiful of Ruskin's writings — 
Sesame and Lilies. He was not able to acquiesce in 
the sufferings of cities. He was obliged to try to 



"time and tide by weare and tyne 177 

think for the foolish and work for the helpless, and to 
give to the disinherited. He was not able, besides, to 
acquiesce in the profanations. 

"The action of the deceiving or devilish power is 
in nothing shown quite so distinctly among us at this 
day — not even in our commercial dishonesties, nor in 
our social cruelties — as in its having been able to take 
away music, as an instrument of education, altogether ; 
and to enlist it wholly in the service of superstition 
on the one hand, and of sensuality on the other." 

It is right that I should quote this unjust passage. In 
1867 the intellectual and spiritual education of thou- 
sands of Englishmen by the greatest music in the 
world may not have made great progress ; but even 
at that time Ruskin, if he had looked, might have 
seen multitudes of people studying music neither for 
superstition nor for sensuality ; the citizens at the 
familiar popular concerts were then beginning, with 
the most willing hearts ever brought to the hearing of 
good music, their education at no ignoble hands. The 
page that describes a stage-burlesque of that day (it 
would only need to be made more contemptuous for 
this) is written with such strange felicity as Ruskin 
uses when, with much feeling, he writes lightly : 

" The pantomime was Jli Bada and the Forty 
Thieves. The forty thieves were girls. The forty 
thieves had forty companions, who were girls. The 
forty thieves and their forty companions were in some 
way mixed up with about four hundred and forty 
fairies, who were girls. There was an Oxford and 
Cambridge, in which the Oxford and Cambridge men 



178 JOHN RUSKIN 

weregirls. . . . Mingled incongruously with these 
seraphic, and as far as my boyish experience extends, 
novel elements of pantomime, there were yet some 
of its old and fast-expiring elements. There were, in 
speciality, two thoroughly good pantomime actors, 
Mr. W. H. Payne and Mr. f rederick Payne, . . 
There were two subordinate actors, who played, sub- 
ordinately well, the fore and hind legs of a donkey. 
And there was a little actress, of whom I have chiefly 
to speak, who played exquisitely the little part she had 
to play. The scene in which she appeared was 
. the house scene, in which Ali Baba's wife, 
on washing day, is called upon by the butcher, baker, 
and milkman, with unpaid bills; and in the extremity 
of her distress hears her husband's knock at the door 
and opens it for him to drive in his donkey, laden with 
gold. The children . . . presently share in the 
rapture of their father and mother ; and the little lady 
I spoke of — eight or nine years old — dances a pas de 
deux with the donkey. She did it beautifully and 
simply, as a child ought to dance. She was not an 
infant prodigy ; there was no evidence, in the finish 
or strength of her motion, that she had been put to 
continual torture through half her eight or nine years. 
She did nothing more than any child, well taught, but 
painlessly, might easily do. She caricatured no older 
person — attempted no curious or fantastic skill. She 
was dressed decently — she moved decently — ^she looked 
and behaved innocently — and she danced her joyful 
dance with perfect grace, spirit, sweetness, and self- 
forgetfulness. And through all the vast theatre, full 
of English fathers and mothers and children, there was 
not one hand lifted to give her sign of praise but mine. 
Presently after this came on the forty thieves, who, as 
I told you, were girls ; and, there being no thieving 
to be presently done, and time hanging heavy on their 
hands, arms, and legs, the forty thief-girls proceeded 



"TIME AND TIDE BY WEARE AND TYNE 1 79 

to light forty cigars, whereupon the British public give 
them a round of applause. Whereupon I fell a-think- 
ing ; and saw little more of the piece, except as an 
ugly and disturbing dream." 

I recur elsewhere to the saddest page Ruskin ever 
wrote (and perhaps in writing it he did not think how 
some few of his readers would share with him its last 
bitterness) wherein he avers that he has at last learnt 
to be cheerful and to rest in spite of the starving and 
dying of the forlorn, and notwithstanding the disre- 
gard with which the world had let go by his courageous 
plan of succour. But in 1867 there was no such 
despair, but much distress and desire, in that generous 
heart. He still thought that there were many who 
would defer the arts, the muses, the luxuries, the 
graces of civilization, the tasks of intellect, and the 
accomplishment of nations, until a rescue had been 
made of the poor. At the time of writing Thne and 
Tide the author had the large desire of saving the 
labouring classes from what Antiquity and the modern 
world alike have held to be the misfortune and servi- 
tude of labour. But he found himself, needless to 
say, with the unvanquished difficulty of the necessity 
of some such servitude. With a laugh he asks the 
professors of Evangelical Christianity — especially the 
ministers — whether they will not purchase their own 
proclaimed eternal reward by taking upon themselves 
the disgrace of the unattractive offices. There seems 
no other way to fill them in the nation as he would 
reconstruct it. He sets about the work of reconstruc- 
tion ingeniously, with wisdom, and like a child : 



l8o JOHN RUSKIN 

" You say that many a boy runs away . . . 
from good positions to go to sea. Of course he does. 
I never said I should have any difficulty in finding 
sailors, but that I shall in finding fishmongers. I am 
not at a loss for gardeners either, but vi^hat am I to do 
for greengrocers .'' " 

It is chiefly to serve the study of profits, fair and 
unfair, that Time and Tide was written ; but amongst 
its many other purposes was that reunion of art and 
handicraft for which Ruskin worked in those days 
alone, and to further which, as also to rebuke luxury, 
he wrote : 

" Labour without joy is base. Labour without sor- 
row is base. Sorrow without labour is base. Joy 
without labour is base." 



CHAPTER XVII 

"the queen of the air" (1869) 

RusKiN called this book a study of the Greek myths 
of cloud and storm, but no more than a prefatory 
study — a collection of " desultory memoranda on a 
most noble subject." The myth of Athena, his 
Queen of the Air, he names one of " the great 
myths," or those as to which it is of small importance 
" what wild hunter dreamed, or what childish race first 
dreaded it," because one thing is certain — that a 
" strong people " lived by it. The myth of St. George 
is of the same influential and significant kind. But 
this Queen of the Air is queen also of the breathing 
creatures of earth, queen of human breath, and of the 
moral health and " habitual wisdom " of the unaf- 
frighted Grecian heart. Queen of the blue air, first 
of all; and in the Introduction Ruskin appeals once 
more to a world busied upon the defilement of so 
much of the celestial blue, but at that moment greatly 
interested in Professor Tyndall's discovery of the 
cause of the colour of the sky — researches for which 
Ruskin thanks the professor, with a gentle apology for 
any words of his that had seemed to fail in respect for 
the powers of thought of the masters of modern 
physical science. 

"This first day of May, 1869, I am writing where 

181 



l82 JOHN RUSKIN 

my work was begun thirty-five years ago, — within 
sight of the snows of the higher Alps. In that half 
of the permitted life of man, I have seen strange evil 
brought upon every scene that I best loved. . . 
The light that once flushed those pale summits with 
its rose at dawn, and purple at sunset, is now umbered 
and faint ; the air which once inlaid the clefts of all 
their golden crags with azure is now defiled with 
languid coils of smoke ; . . . the waters that 
once sank at their feet into crystalline rest are now 
dimmed and foul." 

Is there any reader inclined to take this for a light 
grief.? I protest that it is a heavy one. 

The Athena of the clear heavens was the theme 
of the greatest myth in that central time — about 500 
B. c. — which held more explicitly and with fuller 
consciousness the early religion of the Homeric day. 

" The Homeric poems . . . are not conceived 
didactically, but are didactic in their essence, as all 
good art is. There is an increasing insensibility to 
this character, and even an open denial of it, among 
us, now, which is one of the most curious errors of 
modernism, — the peculiar and judicial blindness of an 
age which, having long practiced art and poetry for 
the sake of pleasure only, has become incapable of 
reading their language when they were both didactic : 
and also, having been itself accustomed to a profess- 
edly didactic teaching which yet, for private interests, 
studiously avoids collision with every prevalent vice 
of its day (and especially with avarice), has become 
equally dead to the intensely ethical conceptions of a 
race which habitually divided all men into two broad 
classes of worthy or worthless ; — good, and good for 
nothing." 



"the c^een of the air" 183 

Ruskin would teach this Greek spirit again to a 
world that had boasted of denying it ; but before the 
formative and decisive spirit of Athena is shown 
centred in the heart and work of men, Ruskin studies 
it " in the heavens," and " in the earth." Athena 
represents " all cloud, and rain, and dew, and dark- 
ness, and peace, and wrath of heaven." She repre- 
sents the vegetative power of the earth, the motion 
of sea and of ships, the vibration of sound. To her 
great myth, therefore, Ruskin devotes a beautiful page 
regarding flowers, a doubtful page regarding music, 
and one of great vigour regarding the strength that is 
rather in breath than muscle — the young strength in 
war, wherewith Athena filled the breast of Achilles 
when " She leaped down out of heaven like a harpy 
falcon, shrill-voiced." And this follows, on the crea- 
ture that lives and moves by air — the bird : 

" It is little more than a drift of the air brought 
into form by plumes ; the air is in all its quills, it 
breathes through its whole frame and flesh, and glows 
with air in its flying, like a blown flame : it rests 
upon the air, subdues it, surpasses it, outraces it ; — it 
is the air, conscious of itself, conquering itself, ruling 
itself." 

The voice of Athena's air is in the bird's throat : 

" As we may imagine the wild form of the cloud 
closed into the perfect form of the bird's wings, so 
the wild voice of the cloud into its ordered and com- 
manded voice. . . . Also upon the plumes of 
the bird are put the colours of the air: on these the 
gold of the cloud, that cannot be gathered by covet- 



184 JOHN RUSKIN 

ousness ; the rubies of the clouds, that are not the 
price of Athena, but are Athena ; the vermilion of 
the cloud-bar and the flame of the cloud-crest, and the 
snow of the cloud, and its shadow, and the melted 
blue of the deep wells of the sky." 

As the bird has most of the life of air, the serpent 
has least ; and the serpent is one of the dark sayings 
of nature — the invariable living hieroglyph, worth the 
reading. 

" Athena in the Heart " is rather a reading by in- 
sight of the Greek mind than a tracing of Greek rec- 
ords. Ruskin has sought that mind "through the 
imperfection, and alas ! more dimly yet, through the 
triumphs, of formative art." He finds Athena in that 
early creative power — we may name it the mother of 
art that dies in childbirth. 

" It is as vain an attempt to reason out the vision- 
ary power or guiding influence of Athena in the 
Greek heart, from anything we now read, or possess, 
of the work of Phidias, as it would be for the disciples 
of some new religion to infer the spirit of Christianity 
from Titian's ' Assumption.' " 

But in the days of art, Athena teaches " rightness." 
Every reader of Ruskin knows well what he means 
by this. Rightness is in the nature of the workman 
— his spirit and his style. 

" If stone-work is well put together, it means that 
a thoughtful man planned it, and a careful man cut it. 
. . . A man may hide himself from you, or mis- 
represent himself to you, every other way; but he 



"the queen of the air" 185 

cannot in his woric : there, be sure, you have him to 
the inmost." 

The command of Athena which is the command 
of rightness antecedent to beauty is spoken thus : 

"' Be well exercised, and rightly clothed. Clothed, 
and in your right minds ; not insane and in rags, nor 
in soiled fine clothes clutched from each other's 
shoulders. Fight and weave. Then I myself will 
answer for the course of the lance, and the colours 
of the loom.' " 

Ruskin renews, upon this text, his warning to a 
society that sets machines to fight and weave whilst 
men are obliged to stand idle. All vital power, he 
holds, should be employed first, natural mechanical 
force secondly, and artificially produced mechanical 
force only in the third place. " We waste our coal, 
and spoil our humanity, at one and the same time." 
Athena, finally, represents restraint : 

" No one ever gets wiser by doing wrong, nor 
stronger. You will get wiser and stronger only by 
doing right. . . . ' What ! ' a wayward youth 
might perhaps answer ... * Shall I not know 
the world best by trying the wrong of it, and repent- 
ing ? ' . . . Your liberty of choice has simply 
destroyed for you so much life and strength, never 
regainable. It is true you now know the habits of 
swine, and the taste of husks : do you think your 
father could not have taught you to know better 
habits and pleasanter tastes ? " 



CHAPTER XVIII 

"lectures on art" (1870) 

The first course of Slade Lectures begins with 
some formality and a sense of the novelty and solem- 
nity of the lecturer's office. The first of the six goes 
to the beginning of things, and has this sharp phrase 
on education : it is " not the equaliser, but the dis- 
coverer, of men," and, 

" So far from being instruments for the collection 
of riches, the first lesson of wisdom is to disdain 
them, and of gentleness, to diffuse." 

The technical education proposed by Ruskin is not 
to enable a man here and there to extricate himself 
from a crowd " confessed to be in evil case," but to 
make the case of the crowd more honourable. Art 
may be mingled with their toil, but on this point a 
modest expectation is proposed. Let us not hope, 
says Ruskin in 1870, to excel — not even in the 
merest decoration. 

" No nation ever had, or will have, the power of 
suddenly developing, under the pressure of necessity, 
faculties it had neglected when it was at ease." 

He closes against his countrymen " the highest fields 
of ideal art," but strangely confounds himself and 
voids his own argument when he closes those fields 
1.86 



"lectures on art" 187 

of art for reasons that would avail equally to shut the 
gates of " the highest fields " of ideal literature. He 
finds in "the English genius (and so proper thereto that 
the lack, in an Englishman, implies some failure or 
weakness) a pleasure in the grotesque, and a tolerance 
of certain gross forms of evil. Let us grant to Ruskin 
that it is there ; we would go further and grant to him 
that because of it Englishmen cannot be the greatest 
painters, if that concession did not bind us to the 
absurdity that because of it Englishmen cannot be 
the greatest writers. As it is, the theory cannot stand. 
Judged by comparison with Dante, we may be, if 
Ruskin will, a coarse nation ; but in that case a coarse 
nation owns one name certainly greater than Dante's. 
Surely because of his terrible custom of referring the 
human spirit to Dante, and of testing human char- 
acter by the rule of Dante's, does Ruskin commit this 
outrage. 

He offers his countrymen some comfort ; if they 
cannot paint the greatest pictures, they can, in the 
persons of Reynolds and Gainsborough, paint portraits 
insuperably good (but in the second lecture he says, 
*' The highest that art can do is to set before you the 
true image of the presence of a noble human being ") ; 
they can love and study landscape by the very fact that 
they are unhappily a city folk, whereas the peasant 
cares little for natural beauty ; and they have a national 
sympathy with animals ; let them improve it and learn 
to draw birds rather than shoot them. And there 
follows a beautiful passage on the inheritance of a 
love of beauty : 



l88 JOHN RUSKIN 

" In the children of noble races, trained by sur- 
rounding art, and at the same time in the practice 
of great deeds, there is an intense delight in the land- 
scape of their country, as memorial ; a sense not taught 
to them, nor teachable to any others ; but, in them, 
innate ; and the seal and reward of persistence in great 
national life ; — the obedience and the peace of ages 
having extended gradually the glory of the revered 
ancestors also to the ancestral land ; until the Mother- 
hood of the dust, the mystery of the Demeter from 
whose bosom we came, and to whose bosom we return, 
surrounds and inspires, everywhere, the local awe of 
field and fountain." 

The students, discouraged, one must suppose, by the 
inaugural lecture, were instructed, in the second, on 
" The Relation of Art to Religion." 

" The phenomena of imagination ... are the 
result of the influence of the common and vital, but 
not, therefore, less Divine, spirit, of which some por- 
tion is given to all living creatures in such manner as 
may be adapted to their rank in creation ; . . . and 
everything which men rightly accomplish is indeed 
done by Divine help, but under a consistent law which 
is never departed from." 

" The Relation of Art to Morals " is the subject of a 
lecture contrasting once more the thought of Antiquity 
and of the modern world. It seems to the careful 
reader that if Ruskin tests art by morality, he also 
tests morality by art. One page of this lecture puts 
life to the touch with a trial like that of Mr. Meredith's 
test in The Empty Purse : 

" Is it accepted of song ? " 



"lectures on art" 189 

"No art-teaching," says Ruslcin in the same lecture, 
" could be of use to you, but would rather be harmful, 
unless it was grafted on something deeper than all art." 
But we have heard him say elsewhere that taste is the 
only morality — that is to say, what a man loves is his 
spiritual life. Whichever of these two answers for the 
other — whether morality for such art as it is able to 
teach, or art for such morality as it is able to teach — 
by neither, nor by both, in those elementary measures, 
are men led many paces on the way they must walk. 
The fact of morality may be established by art, but the 
code of morality whereby we have to control our actions 
and to constrain ourselves has that fact as its starting 
point, and does its effectual work further on. Ruskin, 
however, seems to hold that a working morality is to be 
found in the decisions of art. Leaving these polemics, 
the reader stops with full assent upon this incidental 
judgment of language and literature : 

" The chief vices of education have arisen from the 
one great fallacy of supposing that noble language is a 
communicable trick of grammar and accent, instead 
of simply the careful expression of right thought." 

It is certainly not a communicable trick, but neither 
is it a communicable virtue. The following is one of 
the finest of many passages condemning modern con- 
ditions : 

" Great obscurity . • . has been brought upon 
the truth ... by the want of integrity and sim- 
plicity in our modern life. Everything is broken up, 
. . . besides being in great part imitative ; so that 



190 JOHN RUSKIN 

you not only cannot tell what a man is, but sometimes 
you cannot tell whether he zV, at all." 

Amongst other things we fail in is anger when it 
is due; Ruskin will not away with our non-vindictive 
justice, which, having convicted a man of a crime 
worthy of death, entirely pardons the criminal, restores 
him to honour and esteem, and then hangs him ; " not 
as a malefactor, but as a scarecrow." 

" That is the theory. And the practice is, that we 
send a child to prison for a month for stealing a hand- 
ful of walnuts, for fear that other children should 
come to steal more of our walnuts. And we do not 
punish a swindler for ruining a thousand families, be- 
cause we think swindling a wholesome excitement to 
trade." 

Ruskin will have justice to be vindictive and pun- 
ishment retributive. 

In " The Relation of Art to Use," we read, " The 
entire vitality of art depends upon its being either full 
of truth or full of use." It is "either to state a true 
thing or to adorn a serviceable one. It must never 
exist alone — never for itself." The very commonplace 
of later, but not latest, opinion is to the contrary. I 
confess that "to state a true thing" is a definition of 
purpose against which there may be some rebellion even 
in a mind never subject to the fashion of a now depart- 
ing day. Here, as before, such a mind may appeal, 
against Ruskin's phrase, to the separate art of music. 
*' To make a beautiful thing " is not, however, a suf- 
ficient amendment of that phrase, in as much as "the 



"lectures on art 191 

formation of an actually beautiful thing " is involved 
by Ruskin in the act of art. One thing is certain — 
that it is not by way of dishonour to art that he would 
have art subservient, but for the advantage of its es- 
sential vitality and of its particular skill. Of vitality 
he is the best judge in the world. Of human skill 
he charges the whole world of these three hundred 
years past with taking not too much but too little 
heed. 

"We have lost our delight in Skill ; in that majesty 
of it . . . which long ago I tried to express, 
under the head of ' ideas of power.' . . . All 
the joy and reverence we ought to feel in looking at 
a strong man's work have ceased in us. We keep 
them yet a little in looking at a honeycomb or a bird's 
nest; we understand that these differ, by divinity of 
skill, from a lump of wax or a cluster of sticks." 

It is in the lecture on the relation of art to use, 
moreover, that the reader finds this splendid passage 
on Reynolds : 

"He rejoices in showing you his skill; and those 
of you who succeed in learning what painter's work 
really is, will one day rejoice also, even to laughter — 
that highest laughter which springs of pure delight, 
in watching the fortitude and fire of a hand which 
strikes forth its will upon the canvas as easily as the 
wind strikes it on the sea. He rejoices in all 
abstract beauty and rhythm and melody of design." 

But the beauty is to serve by likeness to nature. 
This " likeness " seems to be rather a strain of the 
idea of " use." And in fact to prove this curious 



192 JOHN RUSKIN 

contention Ruskin is obliged to place portrait at a 
height, as has already been said, that he had seemed to 
deny it. But in the course of this argument is a 
brilliant page on the cause of the dishonour of por- 
traiture in Greek art : 

" The progressive course of Greek art was in sub- 
duing monstrous conceptions to natural ones ; it did 
this by general laws; it reached absolute truth of 
generic human form, and if this ethical force had 
remained, would have advanced into healthy portrait- 
ure. But at the moment of change the national life 
ended in Greece ; and portraiture, there, meant insult 
to her religion, and flattery to her tyrants. And her 
skill perished, not because she became true in sight, 
but because she became vile in heart." 

But these moralities and portraitures are but obscure 
glories of art in use (as to which the reader may be 
half-convinced, or may hold that they are concerned 
rather with the sense of words than with principles 
of art) compared with the kinds of plain and obvious 
utility to which, in the beginning of this course, as 
in the pamphlet on Pre-Raphaelitism^ Ruskin com- 
mends the services of painters : 

"What we especially need at present for educational 
purposes is to know, not the anatomy of plants, but 
their biography — how and where they live and die, 
their tempers, benevolences, malignities, distresses, and 
virtues. We want them drawn from their youth to 
their age, from bud to fruit. . . . And all this 
we ought to have drawn so accurately that we might 
at once compare any given part of a plant with the 
same part of any other, drawn on the like conditions. 



LECTURES ON ART 



193 



Now, is not this a work which we may set about 
here in Oxford, with good hope and much pleas- 
ure ? " 

Not many thought so, it is said. The professor's 
classes were not well attended. He went on to sug- 
gest that geology should be served, as well as botany, 
and urged his art students to the study of the cleav- 
age-lines of the smallest fragments of rock. To the 
rescue of topography, and zoology, and history they 
might go too : 

" The feudal and monastic buildings of Europe, 
and still more the streets of her ancient cities, are 
vanishing like dreams ; and it is difficult to imagine 
the mingled envy and contempt with which future 
generations will look back to us, who still possessed 
such things, yet made no effort to preserve, and 
scarcely any to delineate them ; for, when used as 
material of landscape by the modern artist, they are 
nearly always superficially or flatteringly represented, 
without zeal enough to penetrate their character, or 
patience enough to render it in modest harmony." 

Ruskin appeals to. those professing to love art that 
thev would labour to "get the country clean and the 
people lovely," to rescue young creatures from miser- 
able toil and deadly shade, to dress them better, to 
lodge them more fitly, to restore the handicrafts to 
dignitv and simplicity. But the reform of outward 
conditions must come first, and Ruskin thought that 
art could hardly flourish 

" In any country where the cities are thus built, or 
thus, let me rather say, clotted and coagulated ; spots 



194 JOHN RUSKIN 

of dreadful mildew spreading by patches and blotches 
over the country they consume." 

It is a repetition of the old contention, made doubtful 
by history as Ruskin himself tells it; for whenever 
art has begun to decay it has been surrounded, in that 
hour, by fulness of beauty. 

The fourth lecture is a practical lesson on " Line " 
— that outline which is " infinitely subtle ; not even 
a line, but the place of a line, and that, also, made 
soft by texture." The linear arts are the earliest, and 
they divide principally into the Greek (line with light) 
and the Gothic (line with colour). Ruskin shows 
how these arts began to cease to depend upon line, and 
learnt to represent masses, and how from them were 
derived 

" Two vast medijEval schools ; one of flat and infi- 
nitely varied colour, with exquisite character and senti- 
ment added, . . . but little perception of shadow ; 
the other, of light and shade, with exquisite drawing 
of solid form, and little perception of colour ; some- 
times as little of sentiment." 

According to Ruskin, the schools of colour en- 
riched themselves by adopting from the schools of 
light and shadow " whatever was compatible with 
their own power." The schools of light and shadow, 
on the other hand, were too haughty and too weak to 
learn much from the schools of colour. To them is 
chiefly due the decadence of art. " In their fall they 
dragged the schools of colour down with them." 
Returning to the study of line, Ruskin recommends 



"LECTURES ON ART I95 

severity in drawing as a first aim, rather than the 
finished studies of light and shade practised in some 
of our classes. In the following lecture, on "Light," 
and in the last, on " Colour," he insists further upon 
the happiness and peace of the art of colour, and 
upon the oppression and mortality of the art of 
chiaroscuro — the art that sought light and found 
darkness also, and loved form and found formlessness. 

" The school of light is founded in the Doric wor- 
ship of Apollo and the Ionic worship of Athena, as 
the spirits of life in the light, and of light in the air, 
opposed each to their own contrary deity of death — 
Apollo to the Python, Athena to the Gorgon — Apollo 
as life in light, to the earth spirit of corruption in 
darkness, Athena as life by motion, to the Gorgon 
spirit of death by pause, freezing, or turning to stone ; 
both of the great divinities taking their glory from the 
evil they have conquered ; both of them, when angry, 
taking to men the form of the evil which is their op- 
posite. . . . But underlying both these, and far 
more mysterious, dreadful, and yet beautiful, there is 
the Greek conception of spiritual darkness ; of the 
anger of fate, whether foredoomed or avenging." 

Ruskin then takes us through the allegorv (not the 
representation) of light in the Greek vase-paintings, 
and closes his history of light with the illumination 
of the work of Turner. To the student it must seem 
somewhat fantastic to call the schools of light and 
shadow Greek, for the sake of those allegories of light 
in Greek art — to call, for example, the northern spirit 
of the " Melancholia " and " The Knight and Death " 
Greek. But the student of Ruskin will retain, at any 



196 JOHN RUSKIN 

rate, the fact that he holds the colour-schools — the 
Gothic — to be the more vital, and the chiaroscuro 
schools, albeit noble in noble masters, to be subject to 
derogation in " licentious and vulgar forms of art " 
having no parallel amongst the colourists. Inciden- 
tally I must avow that amongst the griefs that a reader 
of Ruskin has to svi^allou^ is the contempt of reflected 
lights that is but the outcome of his suspicion and 
distrust of the schools of light and shadovi^. He bids 
his classes to make little inquiry into reflected lights : 

*■*• Nearly all young students (and too many advanced 
masters) exaggerate them. ... In vulgar chiaro- 
scuro the shades are so full of reflection that they 
look as if some one had been walking round the ob- 
ject with a candle, and the students, by that help, 
peering into its crannies." 

Ruskin never really loved the landscape of the 
south. In a letter (I think to Miss Siddal) he agrees 
with her that the Mediterranean coast lacks beauty 
because it is too pale. Now, that paleness is due to 
the reflected light in shadow which is the loveliest 
secret of the southern summer, and the surprise of the 
East ; a secret and a surprise (although it makes all 
inner places tenderly bright), because the traveller ex- 
pects, on the contrary, that shadows shall be dark in 
a bright sun, and often expects black shadows so posi- 
tively that he goes further, and describes them. 

Ruskin here, as elsewhere, recommends the student 
not to disregard local colour even in studies of form — 
not to ignore the leopard's spots for the sake of the 



LECTURES ON ART 



197 



lights or darks that are to aid in showing its anatomy. 
He would have the artist " to consider all nature merely 
as a mosaic of different colours, to be imitated one by 
one, in simplicity." In teaching the practice of the 
colourist painters he insists that " shadows are as much 
colours as lights are " ; and that " whoever represents 
them by merely the subdued or darkened tint of the 
light, represents them falsely." In Modern Painters 
Cuyp and others seemed to be rebuked for the sep- 
arate colour of theii shadows ; we must understand 
false separate colour, no doubt ; in any case we may 
settle our difficulties of theory by referring to the 
Venetian practice, which Ruskin pronounces to be 
right, and right in all periods. In 1870 Ruskin had 
perhaps already begun to repent of that Renaissance 
wherewith I venture to charge him in the chapter on 
St. Mark's Rest ; and amongst those periods of Ve- 
netian " Tightness," he was inclining to the tranquil and 
undazzled cheerfulness of the earlier colourists. 
" None of their lights are flashing, . . . they 
are soft, winning, precious ; only, you know, on this 
condition they cannot have sunshine." In our eyes 
to-day the attaining to sunshine is worth the sacrifice 
of every lesser " cheerfulness," and of colour itself. 
And Titian and Tintoretto themselves thought so, and 
Ruskin himself must have thought so when he was at 
the height of his love for them, and for Turner. 
Even in 1870 he writes, nobly : 

" We do not live in the inside of a pearl ; but in 
an atmosphere through which a burning sun shines 
thwartedly, and over which a sorrowful night must far 



198 JOHN RUSKIN 

prevail. . . . There is mystery in the day as in 
the night." 

Writing thus, he had not yet given his heart to the 
unmysterious allegory of early art. But how strange 
an injustice he could do at this time, and perhaps at 
all times, to that divine creation, " artificial " light, 
may be seen from this. The noble men, he says, of 
the sixteenth century learn their lesson from the 
schools of chiaroscuro nobly ; the base men learn it 
basely. 

" The great men rise from colour to sunlight. The 
base ones fall from colour to candlelight. To-day 
*■ non ragioniam di lor.' " 

What, then, about Sir Joshua ? As for the much 
more modern art which studies fire in daylight, and 
that which is dazzled by the flashes of day, they do 
not exist for Ruskin. 

Broadly, he names the Gothic school of colour 
"the school of crystal" (and strangely, too, for the 
colours of crystal and of glass are colours through 
which light comes, and are surely unlike the colours 
of the primitive colour-schools) ; and the Greek school 
of light he names " the school of clay : potter's clay, 
and human, are too sorrowfully the same, as far as art 
is concerned." And he tells his classes that they 
must choose between the two, and cannot belong to 
both. None the less had he shown, in many an elab- 
orate lesson, that the great Venetians had joined form 
and light to their colour, and that they did belong to 



"lectures on art" 199 

both. And it is another surprise to find him declaring 
himself " wholly " a chiaroscurist. He had taught, 
in these same lectures, the colourists to be more 
" vital," and had recommended to the student the 
" mosaic " of the colour of nature ; he had disclaimed 
the chiaroscurists in Modern Painters^ and in the later 
studies of Florentine art was to proclaim himself a 
colourist, as it would seem, " wholly." If there is 
an inconsistency, it is perhaps due to the theoretic 
separation of things long joined together ; but the 
matter is full of difficulty to the reader. At any rate, 
Ruskin must needs give his Turner the names of both 
schools. And having a living imagination for the art 
of action (indeed what imagination ever lived so fully 
as his ?) he insists that action was, according to the 
divisions of this book, " Greek," not " Gothic." Yet 
here again what contradictions, when we call to mind 
the action and flight of Gothic architecture, the grow- 
ing plant in stone, the " prickly independence " of the 
leaf of Gothic sculpture, and the repose of Grecian 
building ! 

The lecture closes with a sombre encouragement : 

" You live in an age of base conceit and baser sur- 
vility — an age whose intellect is chiefly formed by 
pillage, and occupied in desecration ; one day mimick- 
ing, the next destroying, the works of all the noble 
persons who made its intellectual or art life possible 
to it. . . . In the midst of all this you have to 
become lowly and strong." 



CHAPTER XIX 

"aratra pentelici " (1872) 

This course of Slade Lectures treats of the Ele- 
ments of Sculpture. At setting forth Ruskin con- 
demns the lifeless work of cutting and chiselling 
jewels, in as much as true goods are common goods, 
and these crystals are prized chiefly because of their 
rarity. True sculpture he teaches to be the conquest 
of the plough-share and the chisel over clay ; it is the 
victory of life ; and the true sculptor " sees Pallas," 
that is, the spirit of life, and of wisdom in the choice 
of life to be honoured by art. This is another form 
of the lesson on ^' natural form." Life purifies de- 
sign. Here is briefly the indication of the essential 
matter of these lectures : 

True schools of sculpture are peculiar to nations 
in their youth and in their strong humanity. The 
Greeks found Phoenician and Etruscan art monstrous 
and made them human. The Florentines found 
Byzantine and Norman art monstrous and made 
them human — both the reforming schools being 
wholly sincere. 

" We, on the contrary, are now . . . abso- 
lutely without sincerity ; absolutely, therefore, without 
imagination, and without virtue. Our hands are dex- 
terous with the vile and deadly dexterity of machines ; 
200 



" ARATRA PENTELICI 201 

our minds filled with incoherent fragments of faith, 
which we cling to in cowardice, without believing, 
and make pictures of, in vanity, without loving." 

Then follows a sketch of the Thames Embankment ; 
its gas jets coming out of fishes' tails borrowed from 
a refuse Neapolitan marble, and these ill-cast and 
lacquered to imitate bronze, adorned with a caduceus 
stolen from Mercury, a street-knocker from two or 
three million street doors, the initials of the casting 
firm, and a Uon's head copied from the Greek ; while 
the arch of Waterloo Bridge, under which this em- 
bankment passes, is but a " gloomy and hollow heap 
of wedged blocks of blind granite." 

Sculpture touches life essentially, and is forbidden 
to recognise those accidental beauties, such as the 
growth of lichen on a tree, that a painter pauses on. 
Its drapery has caught the life of the body. The 
controversy between Florentine and Greek drapery — 
the Florentine having its own beauty rather than the 
body's beauty — is in truth the difference between 
painting and sculpture. In the study of the Greek 
Ruskin takes us through the nine centuries — three 
archaic, three central, and three decadent — whereof 
the fifth century B.C. is symmetrically the middle age 
and the greatest. He insists upon the naturalism of 
the Greeks, and plunges once more into that per- 
petual question — whether art can ever approach too 
near to nature, answering with that emphatic " No ! " 
to which some of his pages hardly seem to assent 
literally. Once more he reproaches the artists called 



202 JOHN RUSKIN 

" ideal," whether sculptors or painters, for attempting 
to mend nature; and to this rebuke many and many 
an artist's heart must have replied that this is but a 
trap of words, for, at the worst, it is not nature the 
painter tries to mend, but his picture. In Modern 
Painters it had been written : " The picture which is 
taken as a substitute for nature had better be burned " ; 
but are we forbidden to do honor to a " substitute " 
by the name, say, of emissary, ambassador, or repre- 
sentative? 

" The true sign," says Ruskin, " of the greatest art 
is to part voluntarily with its greatness," by making 
the eyes of those who look upon it to desire the 
natural fact. And this the Greeks knew. Phalaris 
says of the bull of Perilaus : " It only wanted motion 
and bellowing to seem alive ; and as soon as I saw it 
I cried out. It ought to be sent to the god " — to 
Apollo, that is, who would delight in a work worthy 
to deceive not the simple but the wise. The Greek 
" rules over the arts to this day, and will forever, be- 
cause he sought not first for beauty, not first for pas- 
sion or for invention, but for Rightness." With him 
was the origin not only of all broad, mighty, and 
calm conception, " but of all that is divided, delicate, 
and tremulous." To him is owing the gigantic pillar 
of Agrigentum and the " last fineness of the Pisan 
Chapel of the Thorn." The beginning of Christian 
chivalry was in his bridling of the white and the black 
horses — the spiritual and animal natures. *' He be- 
came at last Graculus esuriens^ little and hungry, and 
every man's errand boy," but this was in late ages, 



" ARATRA PENTELICI 2O3 

"by his iniquity, and his competition, and his love of 
talking." 

Ruskin gives a Greek lesson on the modesty of art : 
— no block for building should be larger than a cart 
can carry, or a cross-beam and a couple of pulleys 
can lift ; a lesson on the modesty of material in 
sculpture — clay, marble, metal having their limita- 
tions, which are also their particular powers ; an ex- 
quisite lesson on the subtle laws of low relief; one 
on art handicraft and art for the multitude. As far 
as I know, the first — it is not quite the only — refer- 
ence to Japanese art is in these lectures, which were 
illustrated by an admirably vital Japanese fish ; but 
Oriental art was generally represented, in Ruskin's 
mind, by the Indian, which is obscure, dateless, and 
dead. 

Two quotations follow, which need no explicit 
connection here with the rest : 

"Art is not possible to any sickly person, but in- 
volves the action and force of a strong man's arm 
from the shoulder." 

And this from the lecture on Imagination : 

" Remember , . . that it is of the very high- 
est importance that you should know what you are^ 
and determined to be the best that you may be ; but 
it is of no importance whatever, except as it may 
contribute to that end, to know what you have been. 
Whether your Creator shaped you with fingers, or 
tools, as a sculptor would a lump of clay, or gradually 
raised you to mankind through a series of inferior 
forms, is only of moment to you in this respect — that 



204 JOHN RUSKIN 

in the one case you cannot expect your children to be 
nobler creatures than you are yourselves ; in the 
other, every act and thought of your present life may 
be hastening the advent of a race which will look 
back to you, their fathers (and you ought at least to 
have attained the dignity of desiring that it may be 
so), with incredulous disdain." 

The lectures close with a history of the decline of 
great art in the work of a great man — Michelangiolo 
— and a warning against the " sublimity " that has so 
taken captive the world. In choosing to admire his 
"Last Judgment " rather than Tintoretto's" Paradise," 
men have deliberately chosen, Ruskin tells us, God's 
curse instead of His blessing. 

The Spectator accused Ruskin of attempting, by 
his teaching in this book, to make our rich nation 
poor, if only he could make it artistic. But I need 
not insist again on this — that he held the nation to be 
poor, intolerably poor in its millions, dangerously poor 
in its dependence on the bread of foreign fields. 

Amongst the illustrations is that of the two profiles — 
the " Apollo of Syracuse " and the " Self-Made Man." 
The draughtsman of the latter most admirable head 
(" so vigorously drawn, and with so few touches, that 
Phidias or Turner himself could scarcely have done it 
better") is not named, but could have been no other 
than Keene. 



CHAPTER XX 

"the eagle's nest" (1872) 

This book was the one preferred by Carlyle. One 
must wonder whether the passage on the immorality 
of original or separate style in art seemed to him stuff 
o' the conscience, and whether he held an author, like 
a painter, to be bound not to produce " something 
different from the work of his neighbours " — in the 
English language, for example. 

The Eagle's Nest (Slade Lectures) is an essay in 
search of that wisdom which is president over science, 
literature, and art — ultimately the divine sophia also 
called charity : " Art is wise only when unselfish in 
her labour ; , . . Science wise only when un- 
selfish in her statement." Art is the shadow or re- 
flection of wise science ; and both are peaceful, tem- 
perate, and content." The eagle and the mole have 
their natural places of knowledge and ignorance, 
but " man has the choice of stooping in science be- 
neath himself and of rising above himself" ; therefore 
he has to seek the sophia that is beyond, for his in- 
spiration and restraint. He needs " imaginative 
knowledge," and especially "knowledge of the 
feelings of living creatures," knowledge of life. 

" Sophia is the faculty which recognises in all things 
their bearing upon life, in the entire sum of life that 
we know." 

205 



206 JOHN RUSKIN 

And Sophia is offended by egoism : 

"In all base schools of art, the craftsman is de- 
pendent for his bread on originality ; that is to say, on 
rinding in himself some fragment of isolated faculty, 
by which his work may be recognised as distinct from 
that of other men. We are ready enough to take de- 
light in our little doings, without any such stimulus ; 
what must be the effect of the popular applause which 
continually suggests that the little thing we can 
separately do is as excellent as it is singular ! , . . 
In all great schools of art these conditions are exactly 
reversed. An artist is praised in these, not for what 
is different in him from others ; . . . but only 
for doing most strongly what all are endeavouring ; 
and for contributing ... to some great achieve- 
ment, to be completed by the unity of multitudes, and 
the sequence of ages." 

Wisdom is outraged, not only in our art but in our 
science, which we have not used, for example, to 
prevent the famines in the East. Ruskin habitually 
accuses modern men of these failures as though they 
were immediate murders. The Middle Ages he loves 
were wont to put men, women and children to death 
by sword or privation or fire ; he multiplies the thou- 
sands that so died in an Italian town into the thou- 
sands that die by hunger in an Indian province, and 
with these numbers multiplies our guilt. 

" No people, understanding pain, ever inflicted so 
much ; no people, understanding facts, ever acted on 
them so little." 

Mimetic art, says the third lecture, is in epitome in 
Shakespeare's sentence, placed in the mouth of 



"THE EAGLES NEST' 207 

Theseus — " the hero," as it chances, " whose shadow, 
or semblance in marble, is admittedly the most ideal 
and heroic we possess of man " ; and the sentence is : 
"The best in this kind are but shadows; and the 
worst are no worse, if imagination amend them." 
And because the works of art are shadows, Ruskin 
would have us to love them and to use them only to 
enable us "to remember and love what they are cast 
bv." To love art otherwise is to be the fool who 
wonders at his own shadow. Even Ruskin has spoken 
no sayings harder to bear than these. Wise art is in 
direct relation to wise science, we are told in the same 
lecture ; they have the same subjects ; and art helps 
science, and helps her more and more as the degrees 
of science rise ; that is, art gives little help to the 
science of chemistry, little to the science of anatomy 
(it is Shakespeare that Ruskin has taken as the " sub- 
ject," and he gauges what chemistry and anatomy 
have to tell us of Shakespeare) ; but it helps more the 
science of human sensibility, that science which has 
something to tell of Shakespeare's nerve-power and 
emotion ; and it helps most of all the science of 
theology, which tells us of Shakespeare's relation to a 
Being greater than himself. 

The lecture passes to the consideration of the 
Sophia that stands above the several sciences ; orni- 
thology is the subject of the lecturer's present lesson, 
and nest-building gives him the opportunity for his 
loveliest work, wherein we are appropriately made to 
love the nest-building rather than the description. 
And the great artist, Ruskin says, works somewhat 



208 JOHN RUSKIN 

like the bird — "with the feeling we may attribute to a 
diligent bull-finch — that the thing, whether pretty or 
ugly, could not have been better done," and he is 
" thankful it is no worse." And though this is the 
feeling of the great, could not even ordinary men, 
asks Ruskin, be so simple in their measure that supe- 
rior beings might be interested in their work, as men 
are in the birds' ? 

" It cannot be imagined that either the back streets 
of our manufacturing towns, or the designs of our 
suburban villas, are things which the angels desire to 
look into ; . . . but we should at least possess 
as much unconscious art as the lower brutes, and 
build nests which shall be, for ourselves, entirely con- 
venient, and may perhaps in the eyes of superior be- 
ings appear more beautiful than to our own." 

It would be easy to reply that the suburban villa with 
its bathrooms is — whatever else it may fail to be — 
more convenient and ingenious than a nest. And as 
for the noise of a town and the noise of birds, com- 
pared on a following page, Ruskin does not open any 
door on the crashing street he loathes, in order to 
listen to the Beethoven within the walls. Some 
sophia originally directed the prudence of the com- 
mon builder ; much sophia inspired the music. It is 
music again that gravely refuses assent to these les- 
sons of humiliation, repeated in the fourth lecture. 

Ruskin anticipates the murmurs of his hearers at 
hearing him rank sciences in degrees whereof chem- 
istry holds the lowest and theology the highest ; 
nevertheless he affirms that if theology be science at 



"THE EAGLES NEST lOQ 

all, the highest is its place ; and that it is a science 
other sciences vouch : 

" You will find it a practical fact that external 
temptation and inevitable trials of temper have power 
against you which your health and virtue depend on 
vour resisting ; that, if not resisted, the evil energy 
of them will pass into your own heart ; . . . 
and that the ordinary and vulgarised phrase * the 
Devil, or betraying spirit, is in him ' is the most 
scientifically accurate which you can apply to any 
person so influenced." 

All science, the lecture proceeds, must needs be 
modest, because although the field of fact is immeas- 
urable, not so is the human power of research. Art 
is modest ; Ruskin here commends humble landscape 
and discommends the Matterhorns and Monte Rosas; 
although elsewhere he laments that good painters are 
too easily content with the odds and ends of land- 
scape, and leave noble scenery to the bad ones. Art, 
according to the present lesson, should be content. 
The promise that we shall know all things is a siren 
promise, as it was to Ulysses. Let us not abandon, 
for the sake of limited knowledge, " the charity that 
is for itself sufficing, and for others serviceable." 
And for the sake of contentment Ruskin allows us to 
be pleased in the little things we can do, " more than 
in the great things done by other people," He for- 
bears here to intimidate us with that menacing ques- 
tion of the earlier page of these lectures — what will 
our selfishness grow to if we cherish our own achieve- 
ment ? For we are to confess the little we do to be 



210 JOHN RUSKIN 

little, and contributory. Art must be happy, and 
therefore content, even in its rudeness and ignorance : 

" Ignorance, which is contented and clumsy, will 
produce what is imperfect, but not offensive. But 
ignorance (S'/Vcontented, and dexterous, learning what 
it cannot understand, and imitating what it cannot 
enjoy, produces the most loathsome forms of manu- 
facture that can disgrace or mislead humanity." 

The finest art of the world has been provincial, 
limited and strengthened by local difficulties, and this 
is another occasion for contentment. 

The sixth lecture is on " The Relation to Art of 
the Science of Light." Ruskin studies the sense of 
sight as what it is — a spiritual phenomenon. The 
spirituality of the senses is manifest to him, as to 
every thinker. Science, at the time of the writing of 
this lecture, was beginning to adopt the view that 
" sight is purely material " ; but the " view " was not 
a view — it was no more than a confusion of words. 
At the same date some rhetoric had been spent by a 
scientific writer on the sun : " He rears the whole 
vegetable world, ... his fleetness is in the 
lion's foot, he springs in the panther, he slides in the 
snake," &c., which is also but a kind of circular 
work of words. Raskin's retort is so exquisitely 
written that it must be extracted with little shorten- 
ing : 

" As I was walking in the woods, and moving very 
quietly, I came suddenly on a small steel-grey ser- 
pent, lying in the middle of the path ; and it was 



"THE EAGLES NEST 211 

greatly surprised to see me. Serpents, however, 
always have complete command of their feelings, and 
it looked at me for a quarter of a minute without the 
slightest change of posture ; then, with an almost im- 
perceptible motion, it began to withdraw itself beneath 
a cluster of leaves. Without in the least hastening its 
action it gradually concealed the whole of its body. I 
was about to raise one of the leaves, when I saw what 
I thought was the glance of another serpent, in the 
thicket at the path side; but it was the same one, 
which, having once withdrawn itself from observation 
beneath the leaves, used its utmost agility to spring 
into the wood ; and with so instantaneous a flash of 
motion that I never saw it leave the covert, and only 
caught the gleam of light as it glided away into the 
copse. ... I am pleased to hear . . . how 
necessarily that motion proceeds from the sun. But 
where did its device come from .'' " 

From the sun too ; and the flight of the dove from the 
sun also; but the difference of those derivations, 
whence are they ? " Animism " had hardly yet en- 
tered into the controversy in 1872. How much of a 
man does a serpent see .? asks Ruskin : 

" Make me a picture of the appearance of a man, as 
far as you can judge it can take place on the snake's 
retina. . . . How say you of a tiger's eye, or a 
cat's ? . . . I want to know what the appearance 
is to an eagle, two thousand feet up, of a sparrow in a 
hedge." 

In the lecture on " The Sciences of Inorganic Form " 
we find chiefly the lesson on drapery which teaches 
finely that drapery " must become organic under the 



212 JOHN RUSKIN 

artist's hand by his invention "; and in that following, 
on " Organic Form," the teaching enforced — that art 
has nothing to do with structure, causes, or absolute 
facts, and that therefore " the study of anatomy gen- 
erally, whether of plants, animals, or man, is an im- 
pediment to graphic art." Man has to think of all 
living creatures "with their skins on them and with 
their souls in them ; " he is to know 

" How they are spotted, wrinkled, furred, and 
feathered ; and what the look of them is, in their eyes ; 
and what grasp, or cling, or trot, or pat, in their paws 
and claws." 

Then follow some exquisite pages on the dogs of 
art, from Anacreon's in the Greek vase-painting, on- 
wards. Sir Joshua, painting child and dog together 
in their " infinite differences and blessed harmonies," 
never, says Ruskin, thinks of their bones. 

** You might dissect all the dead dogs in the water 
supply of London without finding out what, as a 
painter, it is here your only business precisely to know 
— what sort of shininess there is at the end of a ter- 
rier's nose." 

Yet the breath was hardly gone in which he had taught 
his hearers to study a little piece of broken stone for 
its veining, as, in another volume, we shall find him 
withering Millais for having painted a wild rose with 
a petal too few, and commending Holbein for having 
drawn a skeleton with a rib too many. The student 
should easily understand the difference. In the case of 



"THE EAGLES NEST' 21 3 

the rose the painter had committed a fault against the 
duty of ordinary and innocent sight — a painter's Hrst 
duty, the duty of the daily vision ; not so in the case 
of the skeleton. And almost, though not quite, the 
same difference may be found between geological 
reserves and anatomical secrets. Anatomy, savs 
Ruskin, misleads the artist especially in the study 
of the eagle's head, with its projection of the brow, 
hooding the eye — its most eagle-like characteristic, 
which the bone does not suggest and which no dis- 
sector seems to have taken the trouble to notice. But 
the Greek artist, and the Pisan, knew of it. Further- 
more, through anatomy in art the lower class of animals 
are represented well, and the higher, ill. As for the 
study of the nude, Ruskin holds it to be, at any rate, 
a bad thing for our care for beauty in dress and in 
the conditions of actual life ; and he corrects the 
popular idea of Greek power : it was due little to 
admiration of bodily beauty, but much to those causes 
of bodily beauty — " discipline of the senses, romantic 
ideal of honour, respect for justice, and belief in 
God," The lecture ends with " a piece of theology 
. . — a science much closer to your art than 
anatomy " : 

" ' I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver 
of Life.' Disbelieve that ! and your own being is de- 
graded into the state of dust driven by the wind. . . . 
All Nature, with one voice — with one glory, — is set to 
teach you reverence for the life communicated to you 
from the Father of Spirits : . . . and all the 
strength, and all the arts of men, are measured by, and 



214 JOHN RUSKIN 

founded upon, their reverence for the passion, and 
their guardianship of the purity, of Love. Gentle- 
men — . . . that epithet of 'gentle,' as you well 
know, indicates the intense respect for race and fa- 
therhood — for family dignity and chastity — which was 
visibly the strength of Rome, as it had been, more 
disguisedly, the strength of Greece." 

The following lecture — " The Story of the Hal- 
cyon " — deplores the popular idea of education that 
leaves an Englishman in such a state of heart that 
when he sees a rare bird he kills it ; that is, he has 
never learnt to see it rightly — to see its life. Man 
should see a bird rightly, and a man rightly : 

" Then the last part of education will be — whatever 
is meant by that beatitude of the pure in heart — see- 
ing God rightly." 

In his study of the bird Ruskin proposes the mystery 
of the limiting laws of structure : 

" It is appointed that vertebrated animals shall have 
no more than four legs, and that, if they require to fly, 
the two legs in front must become wings, it being 
against law that they should have more than these 
four members in ramification from the spine. . . . 
What strongly planted three-legged animals there might 
have been ! what symmetrically radiant five-legged 
ones ! what volatile six-legged ones ; what circum- 
spect seven-headed ones ! Had Darwinism been true, 
we should long ago have split our heads in two with 
foolish thinking, or thrust out, from above our covet- 
ous hearts, a hundred desirous arms and clutching hands. 
But the law is around us, and within ; un- 
conquerable ; granting, up to a certain limit, power 



"THE EAGLES NEST 215 

over our bodies to circumstance and will : beyond that 
limit, inviolable, inscrutable, and, so far as we know, 
eternal." 

His contempt for " Darwinism " Ruskin explains by 
the kind of Darwinian argument then presented to 
students. He himself had consulted Darwin's ac- 
count of the construction of the peacock's feather. 
None of the existing laws of life regulating the local 
disposition of colour in plume-filaments seemed to be 
known : 

" I am informed only that peacocks have grown to 
be peacocks out of brown pheasants because the young 
feminine brown pheasants like fine feathers. Where- 
upon I say to myself, ' Then either there was a dis- 
tinct species of brown pheasants originally born with 
a taste for fine feathers, and therefore with remarkable 
eyes in their heads, — which would be a much more 
wonderful distinction of species than being born with 
remarkable eyes in their tails, — or else all pheasants 
would have been peacocks by this time.' " 

The reader will do well to read this twice ; it is an 
extraordinarily full piece of writing. 

From the lovely fables of Alcyone and Ceyx Ruskin 
quotes — it is wonderfully to the purpose of this book 
— the word of Simonides in his description of the 
halcyon days : " In the wild winter months Zeus 
gives the wisdom of calm." But as for us, 

" To what sorrowful birds shall we be likened, who 
make the principal object of our lives dispeace and 
unrest, and turn our wives and daughters out of their 



2l6 JOHN RUSKIN 

nests to work for themselves ? Nay, strictly speak- 
ing, we have not even got so much as nests to turn 
them out of." 

On the old subject of the ill building of human nests 
Ruskin has an excellent phrase for the Houses of 
Parliament : 

" A number of English gentlemen get together to 
talk ; they have no delight whatever in any kind of 
beauty ; but they have a vague notion that the ap- 
pointed place for their conversation should be dignified 
and ornamental ; and they build over their combined 
heads the absurdest and emptiest piece of filigree, — 
and as it were eternal foolscap in freestone, — which 
ever human beings disgraced their posterity by." 

While bullfinches " peck a Gothic tracery out of 
dead clematis," the English yeoman thinks it much 
if he gets from his landlord "four dead walls and a 
drain-pipe." He is lodged as " a puppet is dropped 
into a deal box." But two centuries ago, " without 
steam, without electricity, almost without books, and 
altogether without help from Casseli's Educator^" the 
Swiss shepherd " could build himself a chalet, daintily 
carved, and with flourished inscriptions." No man 
should be satisfied with less than a cottage and a 
garden in pure air, and the nests of men should be 
nests of peace. The word is left, very exquisitely, 
with the halcyons ; for Ruskin adds that the making 
of peace must be in this life : 

" Not the taking of arms against, but the building 
of nests amidst, its ' sea of troubles.' " 



CHAPTER XXI 

"ARIADNE FLORENTINA " (1873) 

The six Slade Lectures on Wood and Metal En- 
graving contain some of the severest of all the 
author's critical work — severest not because it shows 
a fault of Diirer or declares a certain destructive in- 
fluence of Michelangiolo, but severest in its intensity 
of thought and in the closeness of the hold this ad- 
venturous and resolute mind takes upon some dis- 
covered track of thought, however difficult, and 
compels the reader to attempt the path. Many have 
held Ruskin's method of thought to have been some- 
thing less purely experimental than this ; and let us 
grant that he does set out upon an untried quest with 
a "working hypothesis"; but without a working 
hypothesis experiment itself would lack impetus and 
direction, and would sometimes hesitate to move in 
the abyss. That detachment from his own working 
hypothesis which the student of science owes to the 
end of his journey shall we claim of the student of 
ethics also ? Surely there is but one assumption in 
Ariadne Florentina — that wherewith nearly all thinkers 
(including Kant, but, I suppose, excluding Nietzche) 
have done their work — that is, the confession of the 
moral law : that there is a good, and that pure cruelty, 
mere hatred, and ingratitude, for example, are con- 
trary thereto. This book, in which so many things 

217 



2l8 JOHN RUSKIN 

are pursued so far with an infinite courage, enter- 
prise, and good-will, takes no more than this for 
granted, but takes it to heart — takes it so that neither 
height nor depth nor any other creature can separate 
the author from his assumption. 

Everything following that was to be proved seems 
to be proved and demonstrated. One exception there 
is perhaps, and one that must make a strange effect 
of bathos stated here, but 

" Thou canst not pluck a flower 
Without troubling of a star ; " 

And there is nothing touched in these lectures but to 
great issues : I mean the apparently arbitrary law 
tacitly established whereby Ruskin separates oil-paint- 
ing from all the other arts, and makes it solitary, 
judging it by other theories and on other terms than 
theirs. The sculptor, the draughtsman, the engraver 
are instructed to decide " what are the essential points 
in the things they see." Such decision is declared to 
be "a habit entirely necessary to strong humanity," 
and " natural to all humanity." And yet painting — 
oil-painting — is placed in the very next sentence un- 
der the disability (Ruskin here, for the purpose of his 
argument at the moment, confesses the disability) of a 
difference from all the arts in this respect : " Painting, 
when it is complete, leaves it much to your own 
judgment what to look at; and, if you are a fool, you 
look at the wrong thing : but in a fine woodcut the 
master says, 'You shall look at this or nothing.' " 
When an artist to-day insists upon calling his work 



"ARIADNE FLORENTINA 219 

a "pattern" he does no more than Ruskin whom he 
thinks to oppose and refute, but who has said, for all 
to hear : 

" You know I told you a sculptor's business is first 
to cover a surface with pleasant bosses^ whether they 
mean anything or not; so an engraver's is to cover it 
with pleasant lines^ whether they mean anything or 
not. That they should mean something is indeed 
desirable afterwards ; but first we must be orna- 
mental." 

But with colour this whole theory is tyrannously (or 
a modern reader will hold it to be tyrannously) altered. 
It is this insistence upon a certain kind of " complete- 
ness " in painting only and solely that has set the 
enmity (seeming to strike deep but not striking deep) 
between this the greatest of all teachers of art and 
some of the greatest of designers and composers who 
were also painters ; and it is his insistence in this 
book upon local colour as the chief thing wherewith 
oil-painting is concerned that is the cause of his dis- 
trust, his disapproval, at best his half-praise, of some 
of the greatest painters of illumination and darkness, 
those who painted colour effaced, half-effaced, just 
recognised by flashes, fully confessed in turn by the 
over-ruling light. 

Let me hazard the suggestion that Ruskin seems 
resolved, in treating the Gothic or colour schools, to 
set his painter with his back to the sun, so that he 
shall see all things, illuminated indeed but strong in 
their own colour; and forbids him to face the sun 
and to see all the world as it looks in that great con- 



220 JOHN RUSKIN 

frontation — lustrous and illuminated indeed, but made 
up of infinite and innumerable shadow. But why 
should not the colourist look with the sun to-day and 
towards the sun to-morrow, and belong to both the 
two great schools by that simple power of talcing both 
stations ? A man and the sun may surely be allowed 
a complex and various relation with one another. 
True, Ruskin's theory of local colour was learnt in 
front of the works of the Tuscans, and above all in 
the Library of Siena, but is nothing to be added to 
Tuscany, by Holland, by Norwich, by France ? His 
own Turner faced the sun, and he himself faces the 
sun in half his writings. 

Ruskin — to me, I have to confess hardly intelligibly 
— joins the positive definite sight (the sight, let me 
call it, that you get, looking with the sun) to the high 
powers of imagination. He avers that the Italian 
master requires you to imagine a St. Elizabeth, and to 
see her with all completeness ; but that the Dutch 
painter '' only wishes you to imagine an effect of sun- 
light on cow-skin, which is a far lower strain of the 
imaginative faculty." Moreover, he calls the feeling 
for colour modified by sun a mere sensation — the de- 
vice of men, who, '' not being able to get any pleas- 
ure out of their thoughts, try to get it out of their 
sensations." This may have been accidentally the 
act of some chiaroscuro painters ; but is it essentially 
the act of all ? And is this clear seeing of St. Eliza- 
beth in her red and blue essentially the work of the 
imagination and not of the mere fancy ? 

Surely there is no other occasion of controversy in 



"ARIADNE FLORENTINA 221 

this masterly book, wrought out of the very life of 
the intellect. We find this important word spoken to 
the student of engraving, at the outset : " Your own 
character will form your style, . , . but my 
business is to prevent, as far as I can, your having 
any particular style." This goes to the root, for all 
the arts. The technical lessons follow : 

" Engraving means, primarily, making a permanent 
cut or furrow. . . . The central syllable of the 
word has become a sorrowful one, meaning the most 
permanent of furrows. . . . Stone engraving is 
the art of countries possessing marble and gems ; 
wood engraving, of countries overgrown with forest ; 
metal engraving, of countries possessing treasures of 
silver and gold. And the style of a stone engraver is 
found on pillars and pyramids ; the style of a wood 
engraver under the eaves of larch cottages ; the style 
of a metal engraver in the treasuries of kings. Do 
you suppose I could rightly explain to you the value 
of a single touch on brass by Finiguerra, or on box bv 
Bewick, unless I had grasp of the great laws of cli- 
mate and country ; and could trace the inherited 
sirocco or tramontana of thought to which the souls 
and bodies of the men owed their existence ? " 

He has that "grasp"; and explains principally the 
inheritance of the Florentine and that of the German 
— Sandro Botticelli and Holbein. " Holbein is a 
civilised boor ; Botticelli a re-animate Greek." And 
this is his admirable judgment of the relation of these 
two to the recovered ancient learning and to the 
classic spirit : that learning was probably cumbrous to 
Holbein : 



222 JOHN RUSKIN 

" But Botticelli receives it as a child in later years 
recovers the forgotten clearness of a nursery tale; and 
is more himself, and again and again himself, as he 
breathes the air of Greece, and hears, in his own 
Italy, the lost voice of the Sibyl murmur again by the 
Avernus Lake. ... It destroys Raphael ; but it 
graces him, and is a part of him. It all but destroys 
Mantegna ; but it graces him. And it does not hurt 
Holbein, just because it does not grace him- — never 
for an instant is part of him." 

Was ever judgment more exquisite ? And this, on 
Florence herself: 

" The second Greeks — these Florentine Greeks 

re-animate — are human more strongly, more deeply, 

leaping from the Byzantine death at the call of 
Christ, ' Loose him and let him go ! ' " 

Take also this great passage. Ruskin himself avers 
that it contains the most audacious, and the most 
valuable, statement he had made, on practical art, in 
these lectures. He had seen that the study of anat- 
omy brought with it a certain injury, but he had 
sought the ruin of the Masters — Tintoretto for ex- 
ample — elsewhere : 

"And then at last I got hold of the true clue : 'II 
disegno di Michelangiolo.' And the moment I had 
dared to accuse that, it explained everything; and I 
saw that the betraying demons of Italian art, led on 
by Michael Angelo, had been, not pleasure, but 
knowledge ; not indolence, but ambition ; and not 
love, but horror." 



"ARIADNE FLORENTINA " 223 

From the study of Botticelli's Sibyls, full of divine 
perceptions, I take this little passage ; it adorns the 
description of the Libyan Sibyl, " loveliest of the 
Southern Pythonesses " : 

"A less deep thinker than Botticelli would have 
made her parched with thirst, and burnt with heat. 
But the voice of God, through nature, to the Arab or 
the Moor, is not in the thirst, but in the fountain, not 
in the desert, but in the grass of it. And this Libyan 
Sibyl is the spirit of wild grass and flowers, springing 
in desolate places." 

In treating of Holbein, with a triumph for Hol- 
bein's simplicity over even Diirer's gifts, Ruskin 
makes use of some theology. He ought not to have 
permitted himself to use other men's habits of phrase 
by speaking of an " Indulgence " as a " permission to 
sin." The knowledge that, according to the defini- 
tion of those who hold the doctrine, an Indulgence 
(or remission of canonical penance) cannot be gained 
at all without a resolution never to commit any sin of 
any kind whatever, is knowledge easily accessible. 
Here, finally, is the magnificent page, on one of the 
plates of the " Dance of Death " : 

" The labourer's country cottage — the rain coming 
through its roof, the clay crumbling from its parti- 
tions, the fire lighted with a few chips and sticks on 
a raised piece of the mud floor. . . . But the 
mother can warm the child's supper of bread and milk 
so — holding the pan by the long handle ; and on mud 
floor though it be, they are happy — she and her child, 
and its brother — if only they could be left so. They 



224 JOHN RUSKIN 

shall not be left so : the young thing must leave them 
— will never need milk to be warmed for it any more. 
It would fain stay — sees no angels — feels only an icy 
grip on its hand, and that it cannot stay. Those who 
love it shriek and tear their hair in vain, amazed in 
grief. ' Oh, little one, thou must lie out in the fields 
then, not even under this poor torn roof of thy moth- 
er's to-night ! ' " 



CHAPTER XXII 

" VAL d'aRNO " (1874) 

These ten Slade Lectures are historical studies of 
Tuscan art during that great act of the war of Guelph 
and Ghibelline which had its centre in the middle of 
the thirteenth century in the city of Florence. The 
reader may hesitate at the outset to undertake Fal d' 
Arm if he fears politics so transfigured as in the third 
paragraph, in which the mountains rehearse the solid 
and rational authority of the State ; and the clouds 
*' the more or less spectral, hooded, imaginative, and 
nubiform authority of the Pope, and Church." Fur- 
thermore, Ruslcin uses the names of the Montagus or 
Montacutes, and the Capulets or Cappelletti — "the 
hatted, scarlet-hatted, or hooded " — as but lurking 
names for Ghibelline and Guelph ; and in the tower 
and the dome he sees figures of the same two powers 
dividing the great Middle Ages, and contending in 
arms upon the Lombard plains and in the valley of 
that Tuscan river which carried the whispers of Flor- 
ence to the walled banks of the seaward city. These 
allegories in act are somewhat excessive in their in- 
genuity; but the history that follows shows Ruskin's 
severe hold of facts, the facts upon which the historian 
waits as a surgeon upon the pulse of a man he cannot 
help. Ruskin has to tell vital history, and therefore 
spiritual history ; and he looks so closely for spiritual 

225 



226 JOHN RUSKIN 

human meaning into the ambiguous faces of Charles 
of Anjou and Manfred, Frederick II. and Innocent 
IV. (very much in the manner of Carlyle, whom he 
called his master), that it is well he should have the 
resolution to withdraw, in turn, to the distance that 
commands the origins and issues of human history, 
and that from a high place he should see also these 
similitudes of clouds and armies, mountains and dy- 
nasties, and men as trees walking. 

Ruskin is punctual in his science of historical judg- 
ment, and will not allow a passage of five years in 
that great mid-century, the thirteenth, to leave so much 
as one equivocal record. And as the momentous 
work done by Nicola Pisano yields all its significance 
to this scrutiny, so does that antique work which 
prompted him. So like each other as a pod and a bud 
may seem in the eyes of those who do not well know 
the plant, so may the decadence and the promise of 
that various Greek work which we call Byzantine. 
As to some passage of sculpture we may ask, is this 
the impotence of decline — or rather of the time after 
decline, or is it the difficulty of youth .'' Somewhat 
there is, hampered or folded — in the right sense im- 
plicit. From Vol d' Arm we learn that both the with- 
ered and the vital existed in contemporary Greek 
work — twelfth-century Byzantine ; some of this art 
was in the husk and some in the sheath, if one may 
use again the figure of the plant. Vasari did not dis- 
tinguish the one from the other : and some that is of 
the husk is held in honour at the Lateran, and some 
that is of the sheath at Pisa. 



" VAL d'aRNO " 227 

From the Sarcophagus with Meleager's hunt on it 
Nicola Pisano learnt that which was the beginning of 
Modern Art. This derivation of life, which to the 
less accurate eye seemed to be going forward in a gen- 
eral and broadcast revival, Ruskin traces through this 
one strait way, through this one Greek sculpture and 
this one Tuscan sculptor, showing it to be here, and 
here only, a derivation of veritable life ; one genealogy, 
the counsels of one mind, one genius, one little ten 
years' work — how narrow is the pass, how slight the 
thread, how single the issue ! The authentic art, how 
local, and how brief! In the pulpit of Nicola at Pisa 
(the student may study the model at South Kensing- 
ton) and especially in its five cusped arches — trefoils 
— Ruskin, as single in the recognition as the Pisan in 
the design, recognised the first architecture of Gothic 
Christianity, and discovered its point of junction with 
the art of Greece. He defends and holds this pass 
of authenticity, this patent, despite some adverse 
guides who seem to have pushed their way by other 
outlets ; but let it be borne in mind that what Ruskin 
has traced of the delicate differences in the history of 
art he has gauged not by the eye only, but also by the 
finger. He has followed the sculptor by drawing ; 
has felt sensibly and directly the direction of the by- 
gone human hand ; has " remembered in tranquillity 
the emotion " of another ; and has traced the working 
of hour by hour that was charged with all the fortunes 
of the Second Civilisation. A pulpit was this sig- 
nificant piece of art, not an altar, nor a tomb ; and 
the Greek sculpture that inspired it was on a sarcoph- 



228 JOHN RUSKIN 

agus ; facts that somewhat (though rather by chance) 
jar with Ruskin's conclusion to this same chapter : 
" Christian architecture ... is for the glory of 
death, . . . and is to the end definable as archi- 
tecture of the tomb." Upon this follows a fine pas- 
sage upon tombs and their treasure, with the incidental 
addition : 

" It has been thought, gentlemen, that there is a fine 
Gothic revival in your streets of Oxford, because you 
have a Gothic door to your County Bank. Remember, 
at all events, it was other kind of buried treasure, and 
bearing other interest, which Nicola Pisano's Gothic 
was set to guard." 

At Perugia arose the marble sculptured fountain of 
Giovanni Pisano, at Siena that of Jacopo della 
Quercia. Ruskin felt bitter regret that he had not 
seen the Sienese fountain, before it had been torn to 
pieces and restored, except with heedless eyes when 
he had been a boy. 

" I observe that Charles Dickens had the fortune 
denied to me. ' The market-place, or great Piazza, 
is a large square, with a great broken-nosed fountain 
in it.' {Pictures from Italy^" 

The historical essay contained in these lectures 
begins with a passage that opens a door from on high 
upon a historic country. As the generalising historian 
of our first lessons was wont to talk of watersheds and 
watering rivers, dull as a map, Ruskin, using an 
equally large gesture, shows a landscape-nation : the 
valleys of Lombardy, of Etruria, and of Rome — of the 



VAL D ARNO 



229 



Po, the Arno, and the Tiber — fertile with the various 
vitality of Italy ; the chivalry of Germany, of France, 
and of the Saracen riding those fields in war. Against 
some brief historic judgments in his own wilful man- 
ner — sudden judgments making, strangely enough, a 
hasty end of prolonged and difficult thought — the 
reader revolts. Here is one : ^' Before the twelfth 
century the nations were too savage to be Christian, 
and after the fifteenth too carnal." To the glory of 
these four hundred years, then, he sacrifices at a blow 
the Thebaid, Chrysostom and Nazianzen, Augustine 
and Gregory, and the multitude of Bishoprics of 
North Africa, and the great Christian peasant popu- 
lations of the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and 
nineteenth centuries, who have laboured in patience 
upon Breton, Provencal, Lombard, Tuscan, Irish 
earth. It is of nations, not of States, that Ruskin 
speaks ; otherwise, we should have granted him that 
States have not been Christian ; the historian can 
hardly venture to claim that name for the German 
Empire or the French Monarchy, or the temporal 
power of the Papacy. Ruskin further explains his 
four hundred years : 

"The delicacy of sensation and refinements of 
imagination necessary to understand Christianity be- 
long to the mid period when men, risen from a life of 
brutal hardship, are not yet fallen to one of brutal 
luxury." 

Whether brutal luxury is a name fit for the softer arts 
of life — to use the usual word, the " comforts " — 
learnt by mankind since the fifteenth century, I know 



230 JOHN RUSKIN 

not ; it is at any rate a tenable opinion that the most 
brutal thing about them is that they belong to a minority. 
But granting this, there are yet perpetual generations 
of men living in precisely this condition, — " risen from 
a life of brutal hardship and not yet fallen to one of 
brutal luxury." Assuredly that condition was not 
confined to a (ew violent and unhappy centuries, 
centuries when for a superstition little children were 
dashed against the stones of their poor villages. Im- 
perial or Papal ; when, for a calumny, the young devout 
Templars, flowers of masculine innocence, self- 
sacrifice, and good faith, were burnt alive, a score at 
one time ; when, for a jealousy of trade, one furious 
city lay in wait for the destruction of another; when 
the revenge upon a political enemy was to hew his 
son's head off before his eyes, so as to make a last 
spectacle for those eyes before they were put out, and 
ten years in a dungeon without a page to read or a 
tree to look at was a common prelude to penal death. 
Not then only did a people obscure, unnamed, in- 
numerable, live somewhere between savagery and lux- 
ury, but century by century ever since then. All the 
centuries have brought this life to pass, and the race 
has followed this narrow way by a multitude that no 
man can number. Moreover, is that passage, between 
crude conditions and effete, trodden only by a people 
corporately ? A man lately freed from the main force 
that compelled his childhood, and generously simple 
in that freedom, not yet slothful or fond of money, is 
somewhat in the condition of Ruskin's nations, re- 
leased from savagery and not corrupt. 



" VAL d'aRNO " 231 

From that more direct teaching of art, for which the 
student will consult Val (T JrnOy may be cited a subtle 
refutation, or rather correction, of the modern prin- 
ciple as to *' decorating construction," A brief study 
of the decoration of the porch of the Baptistery at 
Pisa shows us how arbitrary is all great decoration. 
Construction is followed indeed, but with happy choice, 
decision, and difference, whereby one member is richly 
and intently adorned, and another left blank — the con- 
struction giving no suggestion of such caprice. To 
decorate your construction, we learn, is a good rule 
for one who should be barely conscious of it ; but for 
a sculptor without the good fortune of genius it is at 
once too much and too little — it shows the way but does 
not teach the walk; and he who thinks he has but to 
follow the road would have a languid movement. So, 
too, would the rhymer who wrote iambics without in- 
spiration in the transposition of accents and of quan- 
tities. As, in The Seven Lamps^ Ruskin showed how 
the outer colouring of buildings had all its vitality in 
its own arbitrary design, so he shows the sculptural 
decoration to have also, though less independently, a 
life of its own. The life of the material, too, he 
touches in the chapters on " Marble Couchant " and 
" Marble Rampant," and the nature, the place, and 
the history of the stone, respected by the ancient 
builders, who laid it as it had lain in the quarry. And 
here, by the way, is another of those sayings that 
should long ago have corrected the usual misunder- 
standing of Ruskin's doctrine : " You are . . . 
an artist by animating your copy of nature into vital 



232 JOHN RUSKIN 

variation." Ruskin goes on to tell that the " reserved 
variation " of the Greeks had for a time escaped him, 
but that he had at last found them to be as various as 
the Goths ; and that the Greek sea or river whirl-pool, 
varied infinitely, was the main source of the spiral or 
rampant decoration of Gothic, and of the luxuriant 
design of the early Pisans. Of Giovanni Pisano 
Ruskin has written : "To him you owe . 
the grace of Ghiberti, the tenderness of Raphael, the 
awe of Michael Angelo. Second-rate qualities in all 
three, but precious in their kind." Great is this 
mind that recognises the " awe " of Buonarroti as the 
second-rate quality of a great man. Ruskin's mind 
was in fact immortally antique, and in possession of 
inseparable Greek antecedents, whatever it found to 
do in the altering world. The ethical sermon of Val 
d' Arm is chiefly on that text of Carlyle's whereof the 
warning has been in vain : 

"This idle habit of accounting for the 'moral 
sense' — the moral sense, thank God, is a thing you 
never will ' account for.' . . . By no greatest 
happiness principle, greatest nobleness principle, or 
any principle whatever, will you make that in the 
least clearer. . . . Visible infinites: 
say nothing of them ... for you can say 
nothing wise." 



CHAPTER XXIII 

"DEUCALION" (1875-1883) 

In 1875 Ruskin prefaced Deucalion with an ironic 
sketch of the unachieved work for which he had until 
then collected material : an analysis of the Attic art 
of the fifth century b. c. ; an exhaustive history of 
northern thirteenth-century art ; a history of Floren- 
tine fifteenth-century art ; a life of Turner, with 
analysis of modern landscape art ; a life of Walter 
Scott ; a life of Xenophon, with analysis of the gen- 
eral principles of education ; a commentary on Hesiod ; 
and a general description of the geology and botany 
of the Alps. Meanwhile, at the outset of this little 
work, chiefly on geology, he finds place for a brilliant 
essay on heraldic colours, fairly proves "gules" to be 
derived from the Zoroastrian word for rose, and not 
from the Latin and Romance words for a red throat 
of prey ; quotes St. Bernard on this accidental sub- 
ject, and corrects the " badgers' skins " that were 
hung with rams' skins upon the Tabernacle of Israel, 
to seals' — from the sea-flocks that then swam the 
Mediterranean by the city of Phocoea, and were as- 
signed to Proteus in the Odyssey. Deucalion, Proser- 
pina, and an essay on birds — Lovers Meinie — are the 
nearest approach that other labours allowed to the 
works on natural history threatened, with a smile — 
the geology and botany were to be " in twenty-four 

233 



234 JOHN RUSKIN 

volumes " — and thev are strangely complete, full of 
that natural fact which Ruskin has acknowledged as 
at once the justification and the judge of art, the be- 
ginning and the never-attainable end. It is perhaps 
with a contemptuous consent to be, by some, misread, 
that in his contention on glaciers with Professor Tyn- 
dall he often slights the name of " science " and " man 
of science " ; whereas obviously it was on the point 
of science that issue was joined, and if he did not re- 
proach his adversary in that this adversary was too 
little and not too much a man of science, he re- 
proached him to no purpose. Ruskin, intending to 
teach the form of mountains as they have stood since 
man was man, and as they have suffered the daily 
strokes of rains or have carried the varying burden 
of snow, makes very sure of the little he has to tell 
of the anatomy of those clothed figures. The up- 
heaving forces of the first remote period and the 
sculptural forces of the second are treated with the 
brevity that befits their unknown ages and immeasur- 
able action ; but to the disintegrating and diffusing 
forces of the earth as the eyes of -man have known 
it, Ruskin gives the study of many a year. The 
human race has had many and many centuries in 
which to watch the Alps — and has made small use 
thereof; but out of those ages of ages a little half- 
century has been saved — the years of this one man's 
studies ; and all that fifty years can tell, in pledge of 
the rest unobserved and unrecorded, was read by him 
with his own eyes directly, immediately, without 
feigning, without use of the reading of others, with 



DEUCALION 



235 



experiment and verification — experiment on the spot, 
and experiment depending upon time. All that fifty 
years could tell to this watchful intellect, from first 
to last, is told for ever, with so much of retrospect 
and prophecy as a slow half-century of the life of 
rocks affords. Ruskin has been for this space of time 
the contemporary of the Alps and of the Alpine rivers, 
an effectual contemporary who measured the patience 
of his years with the long labours of weather and of 
gravitation in the heights and valleys. Of the years 
of the Alps it may be said that fifty were also his. 
This specimen of mountain existence — this great 
echantillon and sample of many thousand ages, is, as 
it were, saved and put upon human record. It is 
saved by one man's watch well kept, as, in another 
region of experience, a specimen of passionate emo- 
tion, difficult because of its brevity, as the movement 
of mountains is difficult because of its length, is saved 
by the instant watch of a poet well kept, and put 
upon human record. 

Assuredly it is not too much to claim for Ruskin's 
work on the Alps and the Jura that it was, conspicu- 
ously, and unlike that of other glacialists, all observa- 
tion and all experiment ; there were, in its course, no 
guesses. Therefore he corrected some inferences of 
his fellow-workers', and in particular ratified with a 
great addition James Forbes's discovery of the general 
internal thaw of Alpine snows ; Ruskin it is who 
finds an argument in the "subsiding languor" of the 
flowing glacier. His work of observation is necessarily 
accompanied by theory and by calculation. On all 



236 JOHN RUSKIN 

these grounds he contends with Professor Tyndall, and 
the contention, to be properly understood, needs much 
more than the mere reading of the lecture, even with 
the help of the diagrams. For the voice must have 
expressed ironies that the print does but point with a 
note of admiration ; moreover, the hearers had Mr. 
Tyndall's assertions that ice could not stretch 
fresh in their memories, and were ready to be sur- 
prised by Ruskin's proof that ice, in fact, could stretch. 
Not that all was irony ; there was some hard hitting : 

" His incapacity of drawing, and ignorance of per- 
spective, prevented him from constructing his dia- 
grams either clearly enough to show him his own 
mistakes, or prettily enough to direct the attention of 
his friends to them : and they luckily remain to us, in 
their absurd immortality." 

In regard to the other subject specially under ex- 
amination — the action of mountain rivers — Ruskin 
has concluded that the cutting or deepening work of 
these waters was done under conditions unknown to 
the present race of man, and that there has been no 
action except that of the lifting of river-beds and the 
encumbering of water-courses, since the earth has 
been man's world. But this judgment upon the facts 
of the past — whether measurably or immeasurably far 
— serves in Ruskin's studies entirely to inform the 
eyes of those who are to look upon the aspect of the 
present, and who need that their simplicity in under- 
standing and their vigilance in seeing should be 
strengthened by knowledge. It is the present in the 



" DEUCALION 237 

act of passage that the eyes are to be made ready to 
perceive, and the lesson is one for painters — indeed 
for impressionists : the mountain, the cleft, the water- 
courses with their past so sealed, and their present so 
slowly to be known, are landscape facing the simple 
eyes of a painter. At the close of his subtle and 
exact — essentially most logical — reasoning on geology 
the author of Deucalion refuses the name of philoso- 
pher, and avers that his teaching is that of the village 
showman's " Look, and you shall see." But the fact 
that he himself has laboured so explicitly over two 
but partially visible things — geology and the past — 
proves how much he himself had to owe to the 
promptings and the checkings whereby knowledge 
guards simplicity, and how little he would trust any 
student but a genius to the guidance of the first sim- 
plicitv. It is surely for the second simplicity that he 
so profoundly prepares. 

It must not, however, be forgotten that although 
Ruskin worked for art with the single and present in- 
tention of giving authority to the plain observer, he 
had long studied the Alpine country, as he tells us, 
" with the practical hope of arousing the attention of 
the Swiss and Italian peasantry to an intelligent ad- 
ministration of the natural treasures of their woods 
and streams." And as he would have done something 
to arrest the distress and disease of the peasantry of 
the Valais — people who hereditary and natural adver- 
sity had forced to grief but never to despair, so he 
had offered suggestions for the protection of Verona 
from the turbulent Adige above the city, and for the 



238 JOHN RUSKIN 

succour of the Romans from inundation. Tiie 
Italian Government spent the taxes of agriculture, 
however, not on the defences of river cities threat- 
ened by mountain streams, but in the decking of 
Tuscan cities with Parisian boulevards. 

At the risk of dwelling too much upon the mere 
controversy of Deucalion^ I must extract the brilliant 
phrase of rebuke : 

"The delicate experiments by the conduct of 
which Professor Tyndall brought his audiences into 
what he is pleased to call ' contact with facts ' (in 
olden times we used to say ' grasp of facts ' : mod- 
ern science, for its own part, prefers, not unreason- 
ably, the term ' contact,' expressive merely of oc- 
casional collision with them) must remain inconclu- 
sive." 

Remember always that " modern science " is reproved, 
throughout, for defect of science ; the phrase " occa- 
sional collision with facts," in derision of the Pro- 
fessor's " contact," is exquisitely and characteristically 
witty. In truth, whatever may be the chances of 
war as to the case in controversy, ill befalls Ruskin's 
antagonist in words : he has the scholarship, the in- 
vention, the spirit, the delicacy, and the luck of lan- 
guage. Take another reproof — that which he ad- 
ministered to the " scientific people " who had taken 
the name of anguis^ the strangling thing — a name 
that was used in Latin for the more terrible forms of 
snake — to give it " to those which can't strangle any- 
thing. The anguis fragilis breaks like a tobacco-pipe ; 
but imagine how disconcerting such an accident would 



"DEUCALION 239 

be to a constrictor ! " This occurs in the fragmen- 
tary chapter on " Living Waves," making one volume 
with Deucalion^ in which -Ruskin accompanies (but 
without contention, in this case, and with none but 
harmonious banter) a lecture of Professor Huxley's. 
The chapter is a kind of spiritual version of the de- 
velopment of species, and a study in hereditary im- 
agination. 



CHAPTER XXIV 

"PROSERPINA" (1875-1886) 

This gentle, ardent, and boyish boy must have 
breathed hard and close over his collections of min- 
erals and plants. He was unsatisfied with knowledge, 
and the books, few and arid, in which he looked for 
figures and definitions, although good in the main and 
sure of his respect, failed him as the "modern sci- 
ence " of later times was to fail him ; he charged 
them with futile words and with the blanks, instead 
of answers, that met some of his pertinent questions. 
What he began over a boy's cabinet and herbarium he 
never afterwards forsook. He was a reader — and an 
untiring one — only in the second place ; he studied 
crystallisation and plants, as he studied the spiritual 
nature of man, at first hand. Proserpina^ a book of 
botany made lovely, was written " to put, if it might 
be, some elements of the science . . . into a 
form more tenable by ordinary human and childish 
faculties " than had been the form wherewith the 
faculties, human and childish in the highest sense, of 
his own elect bovhood had wrought as they could, 
docile and zealous, and ill-supplied, making much of 
little, but yet often disappointed. Proserpina had for 
its accessory title, " Studies of Wayside Flowers while 
the Air was yet pure among the Alps and in the Scot- 
land and England which my Father knew." It is 
240 



"PROSERPINA 241 

illustrated by the writer's noble drawings. The par- 
ticular charm of the book is that it is a real medita- 
tion upon the theme, the work of one who lets the 
reader see process and progress. And the value is in 
this — that the questions it considers are problems of 
the flowers, which the botany book left him, as a boy 
and afterwards, to read in their aspect and to answer 
if he could. The first chapter is full of questions, 
some answered, some unanswered, on Moss — the gold 
and green and " the black, which gives the precious 
Velasquez touches " ; and what the eye, slightly 
helped by a magnifying glass, sees of the tiny structure 
of the moss of walls and woods is described with in- 
finite grace. The chapter on the Leaf is memorable 
for a paragraph in which Ruskin relates his misad- 
ventures amongst the authorities on botany in his 
search of instruction as to the nature of sap. Sap 
was not in the index of Dresser, nor seve in that of 
Figuier. Lindley told him of " the course taken by 
the sap after entering a plant." " My dear doctor, 
. . you know, far better than I, that sap never 
does enter a plant at all ; but only salt, or earth and 
water, and that the roots alone could not make it." 
Memorable is also this from the same chapter — " that 
vital power, which scientific people are usually as 
afraid of naming as common people are of naming 
Death." Ruskin proposes, as he goes, a new nomen- 
clature, more scholarly and more strict — pure Latin, 
pure Greek when a distinction is needed, pure Eng- 
lish concurrently. Nor will he have nursery litera- 
ture to go wild with a semblance of precision, uncor- 



242 JOHN RUSKIN 

rected. This he rebukes with a sweetness that the 
professors do not get from him ; but when a lady, 
writing pretty lessons for children, makes an easy 
show of defining a weed as a plant that has got into 
the wrong place, Ruskin retorts, *■'■ Some plants never 
do. Who ever saw a wood anemone or a heath 
blossom in the wrong place ? Who ever saw a nettle 
. in the right one ? " He cannot know much, 
by the way, of Swiss country households in spring 
who has not seen the good woman cutting young net- 
tles into her apron, for the soup ; good for the blood, 
and an excellent vegetable after the salt food of a 
mountain winter, is this. But has Ruskin or any one 
failed to welcome that early little tender nettle when 
the March earth is dark brown under the cloudy 
skies, and full of life, and along the foot of the 
hedgerows the sod scarce heaves for the delicate net- 
tle and a celandine or two? Anon, Proserpina has 
the "scentless daisy," making much of the humility 
of that flower of light. It is true that many grown-up 
people never smell a daisy, which has a small fra- 
grance close to itself; but had Ruskin for once for- 
gotten his early childhood ? These are but accidents, 
and they merely serve to make somewhat tedious the 
perpetual moral lessons : for an example or a warning 
to go with every flower is endurable only when all 
the facts are beyond question. What is important 
and characteristic is the original and final resolve of 
this mind to confess and maintain the properties that 
men call noble, beautiful, evil, noisome, ignoble, to 
be so veritably, in the sense known to them and to 



" PROSERPINA 243 

their fathers, absolutely — the perception of such qual- 
ities being not only a fact to be reckoned with, at 
least as gravely as other facts are reckoned with, but a 
divine power of the human spirit, its judgment of the 
world. It is perhaps an unanswerable question 
whether, keeping this fast hold upon the idea of an 
essential good, Ruskin has not followed it into arbi- 
trary ways, attributing to things a good and an evil 
that are in truth nothing but the tradition of men 
beset by the collective memory of their primitive 
dangers and necessities, and by the individual mem- 
ory of their own race-dreams in childhood. With the 
moral lesson of Proserpina^ only once or twice impor- 
tunate, and always noble, severe, and benign, are 
mingled such feats of illustration, allusion, and in- 
tricate history as those of the chapter on the Poppy. 
Ruskin's persevering eye saw the poppy confused with 
the grape by the Byzantine Greeks, and the poppv 
and the grape with palm fruit ; saw the palm, in the 
stenography of design, pass into a nameless sym- 
metrical ornament and thence into the Greek iris 
(Homer's blue iris, and Pindar's water-flag) ; saw it 
read by the Florentines, when they made Byzantine 
art their own, into their fleur-de-Iys, with two poppy- 
heads on each side of the entire foil in their finest 
heraldry; saw, on the other hand, the poppy altering 
the acanthus-leaf under the chisel of the Greek, until 
the northern worker of the twelfth century took the 
thistle-head for the poppy, and the thistle-leaf for the 
acanthus, the true poppy-head remaining in the south, 
but more and more confused with grapes, until the 



244 JOHN RUSKIN 

Renaissance sculptors are content with any boss full 
of seed, but insist always upon some such pod as an 
important part of their ornament — the bean-pods of 
Brunelleschi's lantern at Florence, for example. 

" Through this vast range of art note this singular 
fact, that the wheat-ear, the vine, the fleur-de-lys, the 
poppy, and the jagged leaf of the acanthus-weed, or 
thistle, occupy the entire thoughts of the decorative 
workmen trained in classic schools, to the exclusion 
of the rose, the true lily, and other flowers of luxury." 

A mingling of subtle history with morals gives us 
an admirable page on noble Scottish character in the 
chapter on the Thistle. In that on the Stem we have 
a vigorous instruction upon that spiral growing which 
expresses a flame of life, as in the trunks of great 
chestnut-trees ; of that subtle action Ruskin has drawn 
an example in a waste-thistle. We have also a lesson 
upon the structural change of direction that always 
takes place at the point where branches begin to assert 
themselves. Who else has caused us so to feel the 
wood, its direction, its law, its liberty, its seasons, and 
the years of its life ? I, as one of so many whose 
parents read Modern Painters in their own youth, re- 
member my father's pointing to a tree and telling me 
that whereas the Old Masters were apt to draw the 
stem of a diminishing or tapering form, Ruskin had 
made us all to see that no stem ever grows less until 
it puts forth a branch, and no branch until it puts forth 
a twig. And ever after I have felt the stem live, as I 
could never have felt it had I continued to think it a 



" PROSERPINA " 2*45 

thing so paltry that it could diminish as it grew. Who 
but Ruskin, moreover, has had this sense of the mathe- 
matics of tender things ? — " I never savi^ such a lovely 
perspective line as the pure front leaf profile," he says 
of some violet. 

One of the principal intentions in the writing of 
Proserpina was the planning — with a boy's pleasure 
added to a scholar's — of the new terminology that was 
to be acceptable to students in the five languages — 
Greek, Latin, French, Italian, and English — 

" I shall not be satisfied unless I can feel that the 
little maids who gather their first violets under the 
Acropolis rock may receive for them iEschylean words 
again with joy. I shall not be content, unless the 
mothers watching their children at play, in the Ceram- 
icus of Paris, . . . may yet teach them there 
to know the flowers which the Maid of Orleans gath- 
ered at Domremy. I shall not be satisfied unless every 
word I ask from the lips of the children of Florence 
and Rome may enable them better to praise the flow- 
ers that are chosen by the hand of Matilda and bloom 
around the tomb of Virgil." 

Incidentally we have a brief passage of autobiog- 
raphy telling how Ruskin travelled when he was young, 
in a little carriage of his own, full of pockets ; and 
an inn is mentioned as having been described by 
Dickens " in his wholly matchless manner." Wholly 
matchless ; and it is this great describer who says so. 
Now and then there is a slight shock of encounter be- 
tween them. At Boulogne Dickens thanked Heaven 
that no Englishman had been up the tower in the high 



246 JOHN RUSKIN 

walled town, to measure it ; at that time Ruskin was, 
in fact, measuring towers. Finally, from this little 
book on Botany, written with great simplicity, may be 
taken a description by Ruskin of his own language : 
*' Honest English, of good Johnsonian lineage, touched 
here and there with colour of a little finer of Eliza- 
bethan quality." 



CHAPTER XXV 

guide books 

"Mornings in Florence " (1875-1877) 

"St. Mark's Rest " (1877-1884) 

"The Bible of Amiens" (1880-1885) 

Mornings in Florence was written definitely as a 
guide-book — for six mornings with six lessons to be 
learnt in them. The chapters on Giotto are of the 
first importance ; the reader cannot in this volume be 
taken, even briefly, through Giotto at Padua (1853- 
1860), or the abundant studies of Giotto's works at 
Assisi, widely scattered through Ruskin's writings ; 
but he must understand Giotto to be Ruskin's original 
master in mediaeval lineal art, as Nicola Pisano in me- 
diaeval sculpture ; and Florence is Giotto's own city, 
containing his work done at all dates between his 
twelfth year and his sixtieth. Ruskin teaches us how 
to connect the work of his best time with his work in 
architecture, and with the Franciscan Order. To 
Giotto's fresco at Santa Maria Novella we are led 
through " a rich overture, . . . and here is a 
tune of four notes, on a shepherd's pipe." The theme 
is the meeting of St. Joachim and St. Anne, as it would 
be " according to Shakespeare or Giotto." There, 
too, is his " Presentation of the Virgin " : 

247 



248 JOHN RUSKIN 

" The boy who tried so hard to draw those steps 
in perspective had been carried down others, to his 
grave, two hundred years before Titian ran alone at 
Cadore. But, as surely as Venice looks on the sea, 
Titian looked on this, and caught the reflected light 
of it for ever." 

Colour, too, Giotto founded. But all he began of 
Mediaeval art was the continuation of Antiquity. 
His painting of a Gothic chapel Ruskin affirms to be 
but the painting of a Greek vase inverted, with the 
figures on the concave, as those on the convex, sur- 
face, bent in and out, possibly and impossibly, but 
always " living and full of grace " : 

" Every line of the Florentine chisel in the fif- 
teenth century is based on national principles of art 
which existed in the seventh century before Christ." 

The chapter called "The Shepherd's Tower" is 
also, of course, on Giotto ; and the tower was 
written of divinely in The Seven Lamps. Here we 
have a close reading of the sculptures of the cam- 
panile^ whether Giotto's own or Andrea Pisano's — 
and Ruskin has worked delicately in distinguishing 
the two. Delicate also are the suggestions of the 
science of proportion in the chapter called "The 
Vaulted Book " : 

" Beauty is given by the relation of parts — size by 
their comparison. The first secret in getting the im- 
pression of size in this chapel [the Spanish chapel, 
Santa Maria Novella] is the rt'/Vproportion between 
pillar and arch. . . . Another great, but more 



GUIDE BOOKS 



249 



subtle secret is in the ?«equality and immeasurability 
of the curved lines; and the hiding of the form by 
the colour." 

Si. Mark's Rest has in part the character of a re- 
cantation. As the Stones of Venice praised Titian, 
Tintoretto, and Giorgione, so St. Mark's Rest turns 
with an impulse of recognition, of regret for time 
lost, and of ardent reparation and tenderness, to the 
work of Carpaccio. If it were not nearly a cruel 
irreverence to say so, it might be said that John Rus- 
kin too, as well as Europe, had had his Renaissance 
— although his Renaissance was controlled, justified, 
and maintained in the dignity of incorruption, unlike 
the world's. This abundant Paradise of Tintoretto, 
these doges, this glory, what was it else, even though 
its warmth kept it clean as living creatures are clean ? 
Warm in the colour of Titian, this Renaissance was 
warmer still in the heart of Ruskin, but Renaissance 
it was, for the date attests it ; while the great 
painters were at their splendid work, architecture 
and sculpture, sealed with the sign of the Renais- 
sance, were going together fast to indignity and 
death. 

Ruskin, like Europe, had had his Primitive days, 
his trecento and his quattrocento, before the great 
hour when he had first seen Tintoretto in glory. 
The universal custom of change passed upon him 
too. Doubtless he never knew — for it is peculiar to 
genius not to know — how much his lot was the com- 
mon lot, or how usual it is with men and women, as 
well as with mankind, to make the progress from a 



250 JOHN RUSKIN 

trecento to a cinquecento in due time. What befel 
him was, to him, unheard of, even though he was 
giving all his years to the study of a like movement 
in history, for he brought to every change his own in- 
comparable freshness and the surprises of an authentic 
experience. He made his great discoveries with an 
enterprising spirit, and when he had taken his fill of 
his Renaissance he retraced his own eager and urgent 
footsteps, and sought the earlier of the Venetian 
painters (much earlier in spirit and a little earlier in 
time), and, far behind them, the mosaics of the 
Byzantine Greeks. It was not that he had not 
studied these in the past. The Stones of Venice 
proves with what admiration he had read that " Bible 
of Venice " — St, Mark's— on his first visit to the 
city of "tremulous streets"; but now, in a third 
phase of thought, he rediscovered all things, being 
greatly and freshly moved, and thinking, like the 
disciple in the Imitation^ all he had done, until then, 
to be nothing. 

The reading-lesson begins at the farthest side of 
St. Mark's from the sea, at a panel set horizontally — 
a sculpture of twelve sheep, a throne between six and 
six, a cross thereon, a circle, and within the circle " a 
little caprioling creature," the Lamb of God. This 
is true Greek work, the work of the teacher of the 
Venetian (as in another place we saw the Greek work 
that instructed the Pisan), and Ruskin has done no 
more important work in the history of art than this 
linking of the antique with the new. Is it perhaps 
Gibbon with his Fall of Rome that so darkens the 



GUIDE BOOKS 



251 



air of some eight hundred years with a squalid dust- 
storm of demolition as to obscure our sight of the 
unquenched lights of the mind of man ? Ruskin 
joins day to human day again, as the days of nature 
and the sun followed one another undimmed. 

After the Byzantine panel, then, come the two 
sculptures that are the earliest real Venetian work 
found by Ruskin in his search amongst Venetian 
stones. These are no longer purely symbolical, no 
longer " a kind of stone-stitching or samplerwork, 
done with the innocence of a girl's heart," but 
ardently and laboriously sculptural ; it is Venetian 
work of the early thirteenth century ; it is traceable 
through sixteen hundred years to the sculptors of the 
Parthenon ; and it is the first Venetian St. George. 

This immortal symbol-story — story of Perseus be- 
fore it was a story of a saint — Ruskin follows up to 
the heights of the great time of sculpture before the 
close of the fifteenth century. The house that bore 
this work of culmination has been destroyed since 
Ruskin led his traveller, with so much delight, to the 
study of its panel. Not so the Scuola of St. Theo- 
dore, carrying the sculpture of the mid-seventeenth 
century with its Raphaelesque attitude and its drapery 
" supremely, exquisitely bad " ; nor that which bore 
the yet later decoration — the last of all done by 
Venice for herself and not for tourists : " the last im- 
aginations of her polluted heart, before death." 

The chapter called Shadoiu on the Dial shows the 
moral history of Venice to be but an " intense ab- 
stract " of the history of every nation in Europe. 



252 JOHN RUSKIN 

And this history can be approached by a modern reader 
in the spirit " of our numerous cockney friends " who 
are sure that the fervour of Christian Venice " was 
merely such a cloak for her commercial appetite as 
modern church-going is for modern swindling " ; or 
else in a spirit of respect for a faith that was but " an 
exquisite dream of mortal childhood " (and this Ruskin 
calls the " theory of the splendid mendacity of Heaven 
and majestic somnambulism of man ") ; or, thirdly, 
in the modest and rational spirit that confesses men to 
be in all ages deceived by their own guilty passions, 
but not altogether deprived of the perception of the 
rays from a Divinity in nature revealed to such as de- 
sire " to see the day of the Son of Man." In this 
spirit and with this desire does Ruskin begin again that 
history of Venetian art which he had told thirty years 
earlier; begins it "struck, almost into silence, by 
wonder at my own pert little Protestant mind." He 
leaves, he says, the blunder of his youth standing in 
the Stones of Venice^ like Dr. Johnson repentant in 
Litchfield Market ; but the blunder seems to be no 
more than a neglect of St. Mark himself and of his 
sepulture in the cathedral, with all that the possession 
of this national treasure — his body — imported to the 
Venetian heart. From the history briefly re-written I 
take this lovely phrase in description of the first, lowly, 
wooden Venice of the early centuries ; Ruskin calls 
her " this amphibious city, this sea-dog of towns, look- 
ing with soft human eyes at you from the sand." 
When, in course of time, we come to the day of the 
press, Ruskin announces " printing, and the universal 



GUIDE BOOKS 253 

gabble of fools." We need to remember his former 
phrase of pity for peasants who have no books. There 
is a beautiful wayside page about the field that once 
spread wild flowers to the sea-winds before every col- 
oured church in Venice — before St. Mark's itself. 
Ruskin himself had passed one of his happiest of all 
hours, looking out of a church upon a flowering field, 
in England. And here, also by the way, is a passage 
on the Gothic sense of life : 

"The Northern spiral is always elastic. 
The Greek spiral drifted like that of a whirlpool or 
whirlwind. It is always an eddy or vortex — not a 
living rod like the point of a young fern." 

The remainder of the historical essay is a reading 
of the mosaic and sculpture of St. Mark's — the codex 
of the religion of Venice. 

The " first supplement " has for title " The Shrine 
of the Slaves " (the Schiavoni)^ and is a guide to the 
principal works of Carpaccio, whom Ruskin calls 
"the wonderfullest of Venetian harlequins." Fore- 
most is Carpaccio's St. George — " you shall not find 
another piece quite the like of that little piece of 
work, for supreme, serene, unassuming, unfaltering 
sweetness of painter's perfect art," Ruskin says of the 
first of these ; and further on he guides us through 
the series of the St. Jerome paintings. Ruskin studied 
Luini at Milan alternately with Carpaccio at Venice, 
for love of Luini was another sign of Ruskin's 
reaction against his former Renaissance ; and the 
comparison of the two painters is one of the loveliest 



254 JOHN RUSKIN 

passages of Ruskin's work on the purer Italian 
art. 

That part of the Bible of Amiens which places the 
book in this chapter of Guide-books is no more than 
the after-part ; and the volume was originally intended 
to form one of the series bearing the general title Our 
Fathers have told «.r, planned to present " local divisions 
of Christian history," and to gather, " towards their 
close, into united illustration of the power of the 
Church in the Thirteenth Century." The whole 
project was never fulfilled. 

The cathedral of Amiens stands in Ruskin's book 
as the representative work of the Franks in this north- 
western part of the country, and the centuries that 
prepared for the erection of such a sign as this — " the 
Parthenon of Gothic architecture " — are told in a {&vj 
chapters, with the avowed intention of showing the 
student the virtues, and not the crimes, of the remote 
past. In as much as it was not the crimes of the sons 
of the Frank and Goth that raised this cluster of flow- 
ered sculpture, doubtless Ruskin works duly to the 
purpose of his book. He shows us the few centuries 
(three after the birth of Christ) during which the peo- 
ple of this region paid a belated homage to the gods 
of Rome, and the coming, preaching, and martyrdom 
of Saint Firmin in little Amiens, seated by her eleven 
streams, as, twelve hundred years later, the carvings 
of the cathedral were to record. A grave for the 
martyr in a garden, a little oratory over the grave — 
and here was erected the first bishopric on the soil of 
Gaul; and when the Franks themselves came from 



GUIDE BOOKS 



255 



the north, here was their first capital. Two legends 
are told in this sketch of history — the story of St. 
Martin, and that of St. Genevieve : St. Martin, the 
Roman soldier, who in the thirty-first winter after the 
coming of St. Firmin, when men were dying of the 
frost, cut his cloak in two with his sword, to cover a 
beggar; St. Martin, who was afterwards Bishop of 
Tours, and " an influence of unmixed good to all 
mankind, then and afterwards," and who took his 
episcopal vestment from his shoulders at a church 
ceremony, as he had rent his cloak, for gift to a beg- 
gar. Ruskin teaches us of what small moment it is 
whether these things came to pass in fact, and of what 
great moment that they were told. There is also the 
hobnobbing of the same St. Martin, at table opposite 
to the Emperor of Germany, with the beggar behind 
his chair : 

" You are aware that in Royal feasts in those days 
persons of much inferior rank in society were allowed 
in the hall : got behind people's chairs, and saw and 
heard what was going on, while they unobtrusively 
picked up crumbs and licked trenchers." 

The legend of St. Genevieve is of the wild fifth 
century : 

"Seven years old she was, when, on his way to 
England from Auxerre, Saint Germain passed a night 
in her village, and among the children who brought 
him on his way . . . noticed this one — wider- 
eyed in reverence than the rest ; drew her to him, 
questioned her, and was sweetly answered that she 



256 JOHN RUSKIN 

would fain be Christ's handmaid. And he hung 
round her neck a small copper coin, marked with a 
cross. . . . More than Nitocris was to Egypt, 
more than Semiramis to Nineveh, more than Zenobia 
to the city of palm-trees — this seven years old shep- 
herd maiden became to Paris and her France." 

The description of the cathedral is to be followed 
by a reading of the stone sculptures, on the spot. 
But I must extract this, on the wood-work : 

" Aisles and porches, lancet windows and roses, 
you can see elsewhere as well as here — but such car- 
penter's work you cannot. It is late, — fully-devel- 
oped flamboyant just past the fifteenth century — and 
has some Flemish stolidity mixed with the playing 
French fire of it. . . . Sweet and young-grained 
wood it is : oak trained and chosen for such work, 
sound now as four hundred years since. Under the 
carver's hand it seems to cut like clay, to fold like 
silk, to grow like living branches, to leap like living 
flame." 

The apse at Amiens, we learn, is the first thing 
done perfectly in its manner by Northern Christen- 
dom ; the best work here is the work of the only ten 
perfect years, so that from nave to transept — built no 
more than ten years later — there is a little change, 
"not towards decline, but a not quite necessary pre- 
cision." 

"Who built it, shall we ask? God and Man, — is 
the first and most true answer. The stars in their 
courses built it, and the Nations, (jreek Athena 
labours here — and Roman Father Jove, and Guardian 



GUIDE BOOKS 



25: 



Mars. The Gaul labours here, and the Frank ; 
knightly Norman, — mighty Ostrogoth, — and wasted 
anchorite of Idumea." 

In this place shall be extracted a page that the 
traveller should take with him to Lucca — the descrip- 
tion of that tomb of Ilaria del Caretto, the work of 
Jacopo della Querela, which, seen by Ruskin in his 
youth and often seen again, shared with a height of 
the Alps, a valley of the Jura, an allegory of Giotto, 
a myth of Pallas, the rule over Ruskin's life. The 
passage is in The Three Colours of Pre-Raphaelitism : 

" This sculpture is central in every respect ; being 
the last Florentine work in which the proper form of 
Etruscan tomb is preserved, and the first in which all 
right Christian sentiment respecting death is em- 
bodied. . . . This, as a central work, has all 
the peace of the Christian Eternity, but only in part 
its gladness. Young children wreath round the tomb 
a garland of abundant flowers, but she herself, Ilaria, 
yet sleeps ; the time is not yet come for her to be 
awakened out of sleep. Her image is a simple portrait 
of her^ — how much less beautiful than she was in life 
we cannot know — but as beautiful as marble can be. 
And through and in the marble we may see that the 
damsel is not dead, but sleepeth : yet as visibly a sleep 
that shall know no ending until the last day break, 
and the last shadow flee away ; until then, she shall 
not return. Her hands are laid on her breast^ — not 
praying — she has no need to pray now. She wears 
her dress of every dav, clasped at her throat, girdled at 
her waist, the hem of it drooping over her feet. No 
disturbance of its folds bv pain or sickness, no binding, 
no shrouding of her sweet form, in death more than in 



258 JOHN RUSKIN 

life. As a soft, low wave of summer sea, her breast 
rises ; no more : the rippled gathering of its close 
mantle droops to her belt, then sweeps to her feet, 
straight as drifting snow. And at her feet her dog 
lies watching her ; the mystery of his mortal life 
joined, by love, to her immortal one. Few know, 
and fewer love the tomb and its place — not shrine, 
for it stands bare by the cathedral wall. . . . But 
no goddess statue of the Greek cities, no nun's image 
among the cloisters of Apennine, n"o fancied light of 
angel in the homes of heaven, has more divine rank 
among the thoughts of men." 



CHAPTER XXVI 

" FORS CLAVIGERA " (187I-1884) 

This collection of papers being in part biographical, 
I have placed it somewhat out of its chronological 
turn, so as immediately to precede Praterita in closing 
the volume. 

The name is explained by Ruskin at the outset, 
Fors Clavigera is the fate or fortune that bears a club, 
a key, a nail, signifying the deed of Hercules, the 
patience of Ulysses, the law of Lycurgus. 

Of the seven years' volumes of the first series I 
cannot hope to make even the all-imperfect indication 
(exposition it can hardly be called) — the little popular 
guide — that I have attempted in the case of the other 
works of capital importance. The running theme 
of this book is too various, too allusive ; it is not a 
book as the others are books. Unity of purpose it 
has, but it has the form of letters — Letters to the Work- 
men and Labourers of Great Britain — written accord- 
ing to the suggestion of the changing day. The initial 
motive is the redress of social misery — miseria as the 
Italians call it par excellence — that is, the poverty of 
classes, the poverty of millions, indiscriminate poverty : 
not the misery which is either deserved or undeserved, 
or wherefrom this or that man can rise by using the 
shoulders of those who cannot, but the massive pov- 
erty, the collective. 

259 



260 JOHN RUSKIN 

" For my own part [says the first letter] I will put 
up with this state of things not an hour longer. I 
am not an unselfish person, nor an Evangelical one; 
I have no particular pleasure in doing good ; neither 
do I dislike doing it so much as to expect to be re- 
warded for it in another world. But I simply cannot 
paint, nor read, nor look at minerals, nor do anything 
else that I like, . . . because of the misery that 
I know of, and see signs of where I know it not, 
which no imagination can interpret too bitterly," 

The help Raskin proposes is, to show the causes, 
to teach a remedy, meanwhile to set aside the greater 
part of his own wealth for the succour of misery in 
detail, and to set members of St. George's Guild over 
the acreages of the poverty of cities. Having found 
himself rich, Ruskin " piously and prudently began to 
grow poor again," for the sake of the poor, giving 
one-tenth of his fortune, for instance, for the buying 
of land for them. He began to be poor. It would 
be a mockery to say more of a man living, as he said, 
" between a Turkey carpet and a Titian," however 
laborious were his days. In many places he complains 
of the luxury of his boyhood, which made the practice 
of poverty more than he could attempt. He had al- 
ways been generous ; giving annuities with both hands 
— the case of Miss Siddal in her delicate health has 
been made public ; but he reproached himself that he 
had not the courage to live in a garret or make shoes 
like Tolstoy (whom he had not read, but heard of with 
sympathetic envy) ; but, after the self-spoliation of his 
patrimony, he had a great income from his books. St. 
George's Guild, the members whereof gave also a 



" FORS CLAVIGERA " 26 I 

tithe of their revenues,- was to do the human work of 
keeping the garden and dressing it, fostering fish in 
the waters, and flocks and herds on the grass. John 
Ruskin with his own hand tried to tend a Surrey stream 
(at Carshalton) and tried to keep a little piece of pave- 
ment clean in a London back street, and his under- 
graduates mended the famous road near Oxford. The 
Guild was to succour childhood and educate it. Ed- 
ucation was one of his chief of all projects. The John 
Ruskin school at Camberwell, and Whitelands College 
at Chelsea, amongst others, keep the memory of his 
generosity and his sympathy. As the Guild was also 
to see that the poor were not fined for their poverty, 
he himself set up a shop in Paddington Street, served 
by his own servants, to sell tea in small quantities 
without the usual disproportionate profit on the sub- 
division. But for lack of expenditure on glass, brass, 
signs, and general advertising, the people were slow to 
buy at his shop. He would not reconcile himself to 
the fact (made hideous by exaggeration in every street) 
that a thing must be made known in a stupid world. 
He had seen it written by " a first-rate man of busi- 
ness " that " a bad thing will pay, if you put it properly 
before the public." What are the final results of put- 
ting bad things " properly " before the public he per- 
ceived, although neither the first-rate man of business 
nor the public seemed to do so much. In regard to 
the spoliation of the poor and foolish by more direct 
means than the proportional increase of profit on small 
sales, or the profit generally made necessary by plate 
glass and gilt letters, John Bright had said, about that 



262 JOHN RUSKIN 

time, that false weights and measures were not so 
frequent, nor was adulteration, as some philanthropists 
thought, and that therefore legislation had better let the 
matter alone ; moreover that " life would not be worth 
living if one's weights and measures were liable to in- 
spection " ; or so Ruskin reports that deprecation of 
"interference" which was the pestilence of home af- 
fairs in those now distant days. Ruskin thought so 
much inquisition ought to be tolerable. So does all 
England think to-day. He also thought that the poor 
ought not to be deprived of food for fear (on the part 
of tradesmen) that " prices would go down." He had 
seen fish sent back to the coast from a London market 
for this cause. So, too, one year when the sun had 
given a great harvest of plums, a London fruit-seller 
refused to sell plums, for he said, with emotion, it 
would be a pity to sell them for less than so much a 
pound. He had a real respect for the plums. Mean- 
while the poor streets were full of children who could 
buy neither fish nor plums at the artificial prices. 
With these matters the farms of the Guild were to 
deal as well as they might. The rents of St. George's 
lands were to be lowered, not raised, in proportion to 
improvements made by the tenant, and were to be re- 
turned to the land entirely in the form of better culture 
— not necessarily returned to the piece of land that 
produced them, but applied there or elsewhere. The 
tenants of St. George would have no more right to ask 
what was done with their fair rents than the tenants 
of another landlord have to ask about his race-horses. 
The financial work of the Company was to be (largely 



" FORS CLAVIGERA " 263 

Stated) the endowment, instead of the robbery by 
National Debt, of children's children ; and endowment, 
not taxation, of the poor. For the construction of the 
Society ; for its system of museums ; for its admirable 
plan of discouraging the "arts," and especially the art 
of fiction ; for the laws of its public and commercial 
economy (entirely gathered from, and tested by, Eng- 
lish, Florentine, and Venetian history, and obeyed, 
with no acknowledgment to Ruskin, by the practice 
of the magistrates of our own day) ; for the vast scheme 
and its details, in a word, the reader must consult those 
parts of the seven years' letters that deal with it. Of 
himself as Master Ruskin wrote : 

" What am I myself then, infirm and old, who take 
or claim leadership . . . ? God forbid that I should 
claim it ; it is thrust and compelled upon me — utterly 
against my will, utterly to my distress, utterly, in many 
things, to my shame ! . . . Such as I am, to my 
own amazement, I stand — so far as I can discern — 
alone in conviction, in hope, and in resolution, in the 
wilderness of this modern world. Bred in luxury, 
which I perceive to have been unjust to others, and 
destructive to myself; vacillating, foolish, and mis- 
erably failing in all my own conduct in life — and 
blown about hopelessly by storms of passion — I, a 
man clothed in soft raiment, — I, a reed shaken with 
the wind — ! " 

To this passion of grief how shall any one desire 
that consolation had been brought ? Not for passion, 
but for the lack of it, he reminds us, are men con- 
demned — "because they had no pity." To wish him 
less mercy, to wish, with the vain wish of retrospec- 



264 JOHN RUSKIN 

tion, that Ruskin had found some solace in the midst 
of the martyrdom of his convictions, is forbidden us. 

Let this be borne in mind by those who care any- 
thing for the attempt — the conception, the project, 
and the failure of the Company : it was not intended 
to be a curative measure ; it was not to cure drunken- 
ness or to give alms, but to change the motive and 
action of the responsible social world. 

The knotty parts of Political Economy must re- 
main knotty for ordinary minds. Ruskin thinks his 
way through them as though they were easy to him. 
In reading Mill, on the other hand, you find him 
making his way with difficulty. The mere reader may 
choose his teachers, but has the right to ask that they 
shall speak to him in pure and exact English. This 
Ruskin does and Mill does not. There is nothing 
left, worth saying, of some of Mill's famous defini- 
tions after Ruskin has translated them. Those who 
call Ruskin's system " sentimental " (intending to in- 
sult it) and think they have done enough, cannot have 
so much as set out upon the road of his argument. 
It is true that he here and there digresses, as, for in- 
stance, to tell us that ministers of religion had been 
so loud against almsgiving one winter that when he 
wanted to give a penny he first looked up and down 
the street to see if a clergyman were coming. But 
the mental work, when it is in progress, is close. His 
quarrel with the science of Political Economy, as it is 
taught by its popular professors, is that it is not scien- 
tific enough, as his quarrel with the science of some 
geologists and of some botanists is to the same pur- 



" FORS CLAVIGERa" 265 

pose. Although Ruskin says nothing to show that he 
recognises the identity, he holds much in common 
with Mill, for example, the national loss that is the 
price of luxury ; Ruskin, however, shows the mischief 
as well as the loss. But he is alone in stating Eng- 
land to be a poor nation. Beside Mill's cautious 
chapters on Loans Ruskin places this: 

" There is nothing really more monstrous in any 
recorded savagery . . . than that governments 
should be able to get money for any folly thev choose 
to commit by selling to capitalists the right of taxing 
future generations to the end of time. All the cruel- 
lest wars inflicted, all the basest luxuries grasped by the 
idle classes, are thus paid for by the poor a hundred 
times over." 

Let me also extract this, which the reader will re- 
place in the chain of argument : 

" Those nations which exchange mechanical or ar- 
tistic productions for food are servile, and necessarily 
in process of time will be ruined." 

And in the pages on commercial economy, the reader 
will probably find that Fawcett merits Ruskin's con- 
temptuous correction where he states the " interest of 
money " to consist of three parts, and the first to be 
*' Reward for Abstinence." Abstinence, as Ruskin 
shows us, will not make the uneaten cake any the 
larger after it has lain by, postponed, for a year or 
ten. 

It is less from the incompressible main argument 
than from the by-ways of the letters on Economy that 



266 JOHN RUSKIN 

the present pages shall be illustrated. For instance, 
Ruskin commends a communism in all things, even 
joys : " There is in this world infinitely more joy 
than pain to be shared, if you will only take your 
share " ; such a partaking of joys not at first ours be- 
ing the perfection of charity, and strangely enough, 
though a. happy task, more difficult than many a sad 
one. This is from one of those digressions on edu- 
cation which grow more and more frequent in the 
volumes of Fors : 

*' You little know ... by what constancy of 
law the power of highest discipline and honour is 
vested by Nature in the two chivalries — of the Horse 
and the Wave." 

Of his own early travels by carriage with his father in 
England he says that as soon as he could perceive any 
political truth at all, he perceived that it was probably 
much happier to live in a small house, " and have 
Warwick Castle to be astonished at, than to live in 
Warwick Castle and have nothing to be astonished at." 
This sums up, to one who will think of it, much of 
the teaching of Ruskin on national economy : 

" That rain and frost of heaven ; and the earth 
which they loose and bind ; these, and the labour of 
your hands to divide them, and subdue, are your wealth 
forever. . . . You can diminish it, but cannot 
increase ; that your barns should be filled with plenty 
— your presses burst with new wine — is your blessing; 
and every year — when it is full — it must be new ; 
and, every year, no more. This money, which you 



"fors clavigera " 267 

think so multipliable, is only to be increased in the 
hands of some, by the loss of others. The sum of it, 
in the end, represents, and can represent, only what is 
in the barn and winepress." 

Not all the letters are full of this matter. Some of 
them are written from Pisa, Rome, Lucca, or Verona ; 
some are historical studies ; one has a quiet and lovely 
page on the cultivated lands under Carrara. 

" On each side of the great plain is a wilderness of 
hills, veiled at their feet with a grey cloud of olive- 
woods ; above, sweet with glades of chestnut ; peaks 
of more distant blue, still, to-day, embroidered with 
snow, are rather to be thought of as vast precious stones 
than mountains, for all the state of the world's palaces 
has been hewn out of their marble." 

From Verona Ruskin writes of the breaking of a 
thunder-shower over the city, at the outer gates of the 
Alpine valleys, and the slipping into the Lombard 
rivers of a million of sudden streams. Why did not 
the Italians gather the water for their towns ? Some 
men were standing idle in the piaxze (machines doing 
such work as there was in their stead), others were 
employed to " dash to pieces " the Gothic of Tuscany 
and Lombardy, and others to stick bills bearing " Rome 
or death " upon the ancient walls of Venice, but 
there was no time nor money for saving the subalpine 
valleys from flood. At the same time Ruskin gives a 
simple lesson to engineers on the making of reservoirs, 
and to writers (Charles Reade is evidently aimed at) 
on the description of them. They should be wide, not 



268 JOHN RUSKIN 

deep ; the gate of a dry dock can keep out the Atlantic, 
to the necessary depth of feet and inches ; " the depth 
giving the pressure, not the superficies." Thence he 
passes, like Napoleon after making roads, but to bet- 
ter purpose, to the education of girls ; and describes 
with an exquisiteness that at once quickens and guards 
the sweet and humorous and modest phrases, Carpac- 
cio's painting of the young princess. It is hard upon 
two American girls, whom Ruskin saw travelling from 
Venice to Verona with the blinds of the railway car- 
riage closed, to rebuke them by the contrast of their 
mind and manners with St. Ursula's. Incidentally 
Ruskin quotes much from Marmontel, a writer of 
the late eighteenth century to whom he claims a kind 
of resemblance of sympathy, but whom the reader is 
free to think he honours over much. 

The twenty-fourth letter, which is the first dated 
from Corpus Christi College, is the last which be- 
gins " My Friends " : not one of the workmen he 
addressed had sent him a friendly word in answer. 
" Nor shall I sign myself ' faithfully yours ' any more; 
being very far from faithfully my own, and having 
found most other people anything but faithfully 
mine." To the other money-troubles expressed in 
this and other works of about this time begin to be 
added those doubts as to the lawfulness of taking in- 
terest which Ruskin discusses with a correspondent. 
The coin itself is the subject of one letter, which has 
a fine lesson on the florin, and a gay one on the 
sovereign (the sovereign of 1872, and what have we 
not come to since then ? ) : 



" FORS CLAVIGERa" 269 

" As a design — how brightly comic it is ! The 
horse looking abstractedly into the air, instead of 
where precisely it would have looked, at the beast be- 
tween its legs : St. George, with nothing but his 
helmet on (being the last piece of armour he is likely 
to want), putting his naked feet, at least his feet 
showing their toes through the buskins, well forward, 
that the dragon may with the greatest convenience 
get a bite at them ; and about to deliver a mortal blow 
at him with a sword which cannot reach him by a 
couple of yards, — or, I think, in George III.'s piece, 
with a field-marshal's truncheon. Victor Carpaccio 
had other opinions on the likelihood of matters in this 
battle. His St. George exactly reverses the practice 
of ours. He rides armed, from shoulder to heel, in 
proof — but without his helmet. For the real difficulty 
in dragon-fights ... is not so much to kill your 
dragon as to see him ; at least to see him in time, it 
being too probable that he will see you first. Carpac- 
cio's St. George will have his eyes about him, and his 
head free to turn freely. ... He meets his 
dragon at the gallop, catches him in the mouth with 
his lance. . . . But Victor Carpaccio had seen 
knights tilting ; and poor Pistrucci . . . had 
only seen them presenting addresses as my Lord 
Mayor, and killing turtle instead of dragons." 

What a perceptive and penetrative imagination as to 
any encounter with dragons that may befall — not 
Carpaccio's imagination only, but Ruskin's ! How 
much dramatic possession of the matter ! And what 
sense of dragons ! Emerson had been the only man 
who believed Ruskin's story of Turner — that he had 
darkened his own picture lest it should take the light 
out of Lawrence's ; yet Emerson joined those who 



270 JOHN RUSKIN 

rejoice in discrediting, when he took some less than 
noble pleasure in exposing St. George as a fraudulent 
bacon-factor who was lynched, not martyred, and de- 
served it. Strange subject for triumph or scorn ! If 
St. George had been honoured for his fraud, like an 
American millionaire, the laugh, such as it is, might 
have been against his votaries ; but seeing that he was 
honoured for his honour (whether by error or not) 
how thin and unintelligent is the malice of the jest ! 
Needless to say, however, the St. George believed to 
have been martyred under Diocletian was not the 
George of the bacon contract, later a heretic bishop, 
and lynched. The symbol of the dragon did not for 
some ages enter into the story of the canonised St. 
George. On this subject it is that Ruskin speaks his 
only reverent word (or nearly the only one) of a Ger- 
man author, calling Goethe " the wise German." 

In the prelude to the study of Scott which fills some 
part of Fors^ is this passage on some of the results of 
the work of "tale-tellers," those who had dynasties : 

" Miss Edgeworth made her morality so imperti- 
nent that, since her time, it has only been with fear 
and trembling that any good novelist has ventured to 
show the slightest bias in favour of the ten command- 
ments. Scott made his romance so ridiculous that 
since his day one can't help fancying helmets were 
always paste-board, and horses were always hobby. 
Dickens made everybody laugh or cry, so that they 
could not go about their business till they had got 
their faces in wrinkles ; and Thackeray settled like a 
meat-fly on whatever one had got for dinner, and 
made one sick of it." 



" FORS CLAVIGERA 27I 

It is from Fors Ckvigera that we first learn the 
story of John Ruskin's childhood, severely governed 
in the strange sense of the " Evangelical " sect of that 
time — that children should be deprived by compulsion 
of what their elders amply permitted themselves, 
should see self-indulgence at table in those they were 
taught to respect, but should be allowed no dainties 
for themselves. A fasting father and mother setting 
the example one can understand, but not this mute 
promise of a groaning board in the future, when 
father and mother should be dead. Ruskin acqui- 
esces, more or less, in the discipline. It was Dickens 
who made things more equitable ; but the equity was 
established in indulgence, not in fasting. Precious 
are the fragments of biography as the letters go on, 
and most mournful, as : " My father and mother and 
nurse are dead, and the woman I hoped would have 
been my wife is dying." We find him remembering 
amid the golden-lighted whitewash of a poor room at 
Assisi (he not only studied Giotto and the poverello 
St. Francis there, but maintained a Friar) the poor 
room of his aunt at Croydon ; at Notre Dame glean- 
ing the remnants of old work among the fine fresh 
restorations, having it cast, and drawing it ; on the 
Pincio with his arm about the neck of a /rate who 
wished to kiss his hand. We find him (by a memory 
of what had happened in 1858) at Turin, over- 
whelmed by a sense of the " God-given power " of 
Veronese, and listening in a Waldensian chapel to "a 
little squeaking idiot," with a congregation of " seven- 
teen old women and three louts." Their preacher 



272 JOHN RUSKIN 

told them they were the only " people of God " in 
Turin. It had been the turning point of twenty 
years of thought to John Ruskin, and more than 
twenty years " in much darkness and sorrow" fol- 
lowed it, but during this sermon he had renounced 
the sect of his youth. 

Ruskin's diction is noble in vigour and high in vi- 
tality in this work of impassioned intellect, Fors Clav- 
igera. Not here does he force with difficulty the tired 
and inelastic common speech to explain his untired 
mind, as in some pages of Modern Painters ; not here 
are perorations of eloquence over-rich ; not here con- 
structions after Hooker, nor signs of Gibbon. All 
the diction is fused in the fiery life, and the lesser 
beauties of eloquence are far transcended. During 
the publication of these letters the world told him, 
now that he could express himself but could not think, 
and now that he was effeminate. But he was giving 
to that world the words of a martyr of thought, and 
the martyr was a man. 



CHAPTER XXVII * 
"pr^terita" (1885-1889) 

The limits of a brief expository essay debar me 
from giving so much as an outline of small out-lying 
books, early pamphlets and articles, and later lectures, 
public letters, and such minor incidental work as the 
notes on the Royal Academy of six years ; the notes 
on the Turner drawings ; the ten conversation-lec- 
tures to little school-girls on the elements of crystal- 
lisation, published under the title Ethics of the Dust 
(1866) ; The Laws of F'esole (1877-1878) ; The Pleas- 
ures of England (1885), which were the last of the 
Slade lectures; Hortus Inclusus (1874-1887) — the let- 
ters to Miss Beever and her sister, who collected the 
volume Frondes Agrestes from Modern Painters; the 
studies of the architecture of the Cistercian Order; 
and the- re-published volume of early poetry. Arrows 
of the Chace and On the 0/<^ ^o^^^ contain respectively 
the public letters and the magazine papers, collected. 
There remains, therefore, only the book of autobiog- 
raphy, the last page whereof was the last written by 
Ruskin for the world. 

The friendship with Turner in Ruskin's youth is 
presented to us as a relation warm and equal in the 
elder generation ; but as to himself Ruskin records 
little but slight discouragement from the painter he 
loved. Turner seems to have been principally anxious 

273 



274 JOHN RUSKIN 

that the voung author should give his parents no anx- 
iety on his travels: "They u^ill be in such a fidge 
about you," we find Turner saying dubiously on his 
own doorstep when Ruskin was to travel alone. " It 
used to be, to my father, *■ yours most truly,' and to 
me * yours truly.' " Ruskin's first defence of the old 
man (it was against a criticism in Blachvood' s Maga- 
%'ine^ in 1836, and Ruskin was seventeen) is acknowl- 
edged with thanks but without praise, and Turner 
adds, " I never move in these matters." We read of 
Ruskin's own study of drawing. He learnt, whilst 
yet in his teens, of Copley Fielding, 

" To wash colour smoothly in successive tints, to 
shade cobalt through pink madder into yellow ochre 
for skies, to use a broken scraggy touch for the tops 
of mountains, to represent calm lakes by broad strips 
of shade with lines of light between them, . . . 
to produce dark clouds and rain with twelve or twenty 
successive washes, and to crumble burnt umber with 
a dry brush for foliage and foreground." 

But this was a pupil who was discovering a manner 
of measuring the degrees of blue in the sky, and who 
was acquiring the only true temper of solitude — un- 
like, he found later, to Carlyle's : 

"That the rest of the world was waste to him un- 
less he had admirers in it, is a sorry state of sentiment 
enough. . . . My entire delight was in observing 
without being myself noticed. ... I was abso- 
lutely interested in men and their ways, as I was in- 
terested in marmots and chamois, in tomtits and trout. 
If only they would stay still and let me look at them, 
and not get into their holes and up their heights." 



" PRi^iTF.RITA 275 

The most moving passage in the first volume shows 
the opening to Ruskin of the " Gates of the Hills," 
on his " impassioned petition " to his parents that the 
way of travel might, for the first time, lie towards the 
Alps — 

" Gates of the Hills ; opening for me to a new life — 
to cease no more, except at the Gates of the Hills 
whence one returns not." 

It is from the slight record of the books taken into 
the travelling-carriage that I quote this magnificent 
image of the great balance of Johnson's style : 

" I valued his sentences not primarily because they 
were symmetrical, but because they were just, and 
clear ; . . . it is a method of judgment rarely 
used by the average public, who . . . are as 
ready with their applause for a sentence of Macaulay's, 
which may have no more sense in it than a blot 
pinched between doubled paper, as to reject one of 
Johnson's, . . . though its symmetry be as of thun- 
der answering from tiuo horizons.'" 

We find Ruskin, " of age," making drawings rather 
in imitation of Turner, and "out of his own head," 
than in the copying of Copley Fielding ; drawings 
with rocks, castles, and balustrades. He was aware, 
throughout his life, of his lack of inventive imagina- 
tion : " I can no more write a story than compose a 
picture," he says in reference to his story for children. 
The King of the Golden River. It was a bit of i\y 
round a thorn stem that first drew his eyes to the life 
of things, and next he studied an aspen-tree against 



276 JOHN RUSKIN 

the skv on a road through Fontainebleau ; in a later 
page he avows that his drawings of Venetian stones 
were " living and like." And with these traces of 
travel are the records of Beauvais, Bourges, Chartres, 
Rouen, a magnificent chapter on Geneva and the 
Rhone, and on his discovery of the Campo Santo at 
Pisa, and of Lucca, to be beloved for the rest of life. 
Here was the tomb of Ilaria del Caretto, and 

" Here in Lucca I found myself suddenly in the 
presence of twelfth century buildings, originally set in 
such balance of masonry that they could all stand 
without mortar; and in material so incorruptible, 
that after six hundred years of sunshine and rain, a 
lancet could not now be put between their joints." 

In the Pisan cemetery Ruskin drew, seated on a 
scaffold level with the frescoes : 

"I, . . . being by this time practiced in deli- 
cate curves, by having drawn trees and grass rightly, 
got far better results than I had hoped, and had an 
extremely happy fortnight of it. For as the triumph 
of Death was no new thought to me, the life of her- 
mits was no temptation." 

At Florence he made friends with the Friars at 
Fiesole (he insists upon " Fesole," with an acute ac- 
cent that has no existence in the Italian language), 
for the Friars had not yet been expelled by law, and 
there remained some living ancient stones in Italy, 
later destroyed, or restored, or dead, dark, and dull 
within museums. His principal work was at Santa 
Maria Novella and San Marco, and his master, Fra 



"pr/eterita" 277 

Angelico — " Lippi and Botticelli being still far beyond 
me." 

Why did Ruskin never go to Spain ? He owns 
that he admires in himself the "simplicity of affec- 
tion " that kept him in love year by year with Calais 
sands, and the Narcissus meadows of Vevay, and the 
tomb at Lucca, whereas he heard even more than the 
customary praises (through his father's wine-making 
relations) of the sierras and of the architecture. It 
seems that he decided, on the evidence of " the abso- 
lutely careful and faithful work of David Roberts," 
that Spanish and Arab buildings were merely luxurious 
in ornament, and inconstructive in character. He 
went no further ; and had, besides, more than enough 
on the ways of study that knew his feet. It is in 
allusion to Spain, however, that in this second volume 
of Praterita we find the first signs of his vigilance 
in other things than the leaves of nature or the arts 
of man. It is in the chapter called " The Feasts 
of the Vandals," which names the guests received in 
the Ruskins' house. Amongst then were the daugh- 
ters of the wine-selling partner, M. Domecq, in those 
days married. 

" Elise, Comtesse des Roys, and Caroline, Princesse 
Bethune, came with their husbands . . . partly 
to see London, partly to discuss with my father his 
management of the English market : and the way in 
which these lords, virtually, of lands both in France 
and Spain, though men of sense and honour; and 
their wives, though women of gentle and amiable dis- 
position, . . . spoke of their Spanish labourers 
and French tenantry, with no idea whatever respect- 



278 JOHN RUSKIN 

ing them but that, except as producers by their labour 
ot money to be spent in Paris, they were cumberers 
of the ground, gave me the first clue to the real 
sources of wrong in the social laws of modern Europe. 
It was already beginning to be, if not a ques- 
tion, at least a marvel with me, that these graceful 
and gay Andalusians, who played guitars, danced 
boleros, and fought bulls, should virtually get no good 
of their beautiful country but the bunch of grapes or 
stalk of garlic they frugally dined on ; that its precious 
wine was not for them, still less the money it was sold 
for ; but the one came to crown our Vandalic feasts, 
and the other furnished our . . . walls with 
pictures, our . . . gardens with milk and honey, 
and five noble houses in Paris with the means of 
beautiful dominance in its Elysian fields." 

Ruskin's friendship with Dr. John Brown, a friend 
of his father's race and native town, and therefore, he 
says, best of friends for him, is conspicuous in the 
second volume. Of the long friendship with Carlyle 
there is little trace, and that little a report not of 
Ruskin's but of Carlyle's youth. Margaret was the 
daughter of the schoolmaster who gave to Carlyle his 
first valid lessons in Latin. She lived to be twenty- 
seven. Carlyle told Ruskin, " The last time that I 
wept aloud in the world, I think was at her death." 

During the journeys told in the earlier pages of this 
volume, Ruskin was meditating the second volume of 
Modern Painters. Sydney Smith was amongst the 
most eagerly expectant. Ruskin says : 

"All the main principles of metaphysics asserted in 
the opening of Modern Painters had been, with con- 



" PR^TERITA 279 

elusive decision and simplicity, laid down by Sydney 
himself in the lectures he gave on Moral Philosophy 
at the Royal Institution in the years 1804-5-6, of 
which he had never himself recognised the impor- 
tance." 

The reader may remember, I will add, that Sydney 
Smith was slightly contemned as a sentimentalist for 
his advocacy of the cause of " climbing boys." At 
any rate, those readers who care for children and for 
the English language may have in their minds the 
phrases whereby, in the course of his plea for legisla- 
tion in that matter, he rebuked the world of his day 
for its profligate indifference. 

To the signature " Kataphusin," used in the earliest 
of Ruskin's essays, had followed that of " A Graduate 
of Oxford," and the work so signed was looked for, 
as Ruskin himself says, " by more people than my 
father and mother " ; but Sydney Smith was the 
earliest admirer in high places. Ruskin's fame was 
already old, and he still young, when on the Lake of 
Geneva he met his American reader, Charles Eliot 
Norton — " my second friend after Dr. John Brown : 
my first real tutor." This friend was of his 
own age, but a greater reader, Ruskin found, and a 
better scholar. In 1888, writing Prceterita at Sallen- 
ches, he says in regard to this friendship : 

" I can see them at this moment, those mountain 
meadows, if I rise from my writing-table . . . ; 
yes, and there is the very path we climbed together, 
apparently unchanged. But on what seemed then 
the everlasting hills, beyond which the dawn rose 



280 JOHN RUSKIN 

cloudless, and on the heaven in which it rose, and on 
all that we that day knew, of human mind and virtue 
— how great the change, and sorrowful, I cannot 
measure." 

There is a great deal, in these last of all volumes, 
about preachers to whose sermons Ruskin listened in 
his youth, and about monks and friars whom he then 
visited abroad. And in this connexion I must extract 
a charming passage from one of the letters, of thirty 
years later, to Miss Beever, from Assisi : 

" The sacristan gives me my coiFee for lunch in his 
own little cell, looking out on the olive woods ; 
and then perhaps we go into the sacristy and 
have a reverent little poke-out of relics. 
Things that are only shown twice in the year or so, 
with fumigation ! all the congregation on their knees 
— and the sacristan and I having a great heap of them 
on the table at once, like a dinner-service ! " 

But he lived to see another kind of Italy. He hoped 
never again to hear the summer evening noises of an 
Italian town as they appalled his indignant ears in one 
of his last Italian summers — a summer of the long 
foretold and long desired days of political unity. Tear- 
ings to pieces and restorations he was compelled to see 
under the various political conditions of half a century. 
More inevitable things than these, in all countries, 
displeased him ; howbeit he resigned himself, many 
years after the invention of railways, to main lines. 
It was the by-ways of the rail that he thought unneces- 
sary and unnecessarily destructive : 



PRiETERITA 



281 



" There was a rocky valley between Buxton and 
Balcewell, divine as the vale of Tempe ; you might 
have seen the gods there morning and evening — Apollo 
and all the sweet Muses of the Light. You enter- 
prised a railroad, . . . you blasted its rocks away, 
. . and now every fool in Buxton can be at 
Bakewell in half an hour, and every fool in Bakewell 
at Buxton." 

The last phrase of the last volume (1889) closes a 
remembrance of Fonte Branda, the waters Dante re- 
membered in the streamless place. With Charles 
Norton Ruskin had drunk of those sweet waters under 
the arches that hooded the head of Dante ; and, as it 
chances, these last of all words composed by Ruskin 
end, in Dante's way, with " the stars." " Mixed with 
the lightning," he says of the fireflies of one of those 
Italian summer nights, " and more intense than the 
stars." After this he wrote no more. But the last 
extract here shall be from the notes on a Turner ex- 
hibition in 1878, written just before the gravest illness 
of his life : 

"Oh that someone had told me in my youth, when 
all my heart seemed to be set on these colours and 
clouds that appear for a little while and then vanish 
away, how little my love of them would serve me 
when the silence of lawn and wood in the dews of 
morning should be completed -, and all my thoughts 
should be of those whom, by neither, I was to meet 
more ! " 



CHRONOLOGY 



The kindness of Mr. Ruskin's friend and mine, Mr. S. C. 
Cockerell, gives me the advantage of borrowing, with some slight 
abbreviations, his excellent biographical Chronology. 

1S19. — Feb. 8. John Ruskin born; 54 Hunter Street, Brunswick 
Square. 

1822. — To Perth. Portrait by Northcote. 

1823. — Summer tour in S. W. of England. Removed to 28 Heme 
Hill. 

1824.— To the Lakes, Keswick, Perth. 

1825. — To Paris, Brussels, Waterloo. 

1826. — Wrote first poem " The Needless Alarm." Summer tour 
to the Lakes and Perth. Began Latin. 

1827. — Summer at Perth. 

1828. — Summer in West of England. His cousin Mary Richard- 
son adopted by his parents. 

1829. — Summer in Kent. 

1830. — Tour to the Lakes. Began Greek. Copied Cruikshank. 

183 1. — First drawing lessons from Runciman. Summer tour in 
Wales. Began mathematics. 

1832. — Summer tour in Kent. 

1833.— First Turner study in Rodgers' Italy. Tour to the Rhine 
and Switzerland. Copied Rembrandt. Went to day-school. 

1834. — First study of Alpine geology. First published writings. 
Summer tour in West of England. 

1835. — Tour to Switzerland and Italy. First published poems. 

1836. — Visit of the Domecqs. Drawing-lessons from Coi>]ey 
Fielding. Wrote Defence of Turner. Tour to the South 
Coast after matriculating at Christ Church. 

1837. — Went into residence at Oxford. Summer tour to the Lakes 
and Yorkshire. Began Poetry of Architecture, and The Con- 
vergence of Perpendiculars. 

283 



284 CHRONOLOGY 

1838. — Wrote essay, Comparative Advantages of Music ami 

Painting. Tour to the Lakes. 
1839. — Recited Newdigate prize poem at Commemoration. Tour 

to Cheddar, Devon, and Cornwall. Read with Osborne 

Gordon. 
1840. — Threatened with consumption. By Loire and Riviera to 

Rome. 
1 84 1. — At Naples, Bologna, Venice, Basle. Under treatment at 

Leamington. Drawing-lessons from Harding. 
1842. — Passed final examination, and took B.A. degree. Saw 

Turner's Swiss sketches. Study of ivy from nature. Tour to 

France and Switzerland. Wrote Modern Painters, vol. i. 
1843. — Removed from Heme Hill to Denmark Hill. Took M.A. 

degree. 
1844. — Tour in Switzerland. Studied Old Masters at the 

Louvre. 
1845. — First tour alone. To Pisa. Study of Christian art at Lucca 

and Florence. To Verona. Study of Tintoretto at Venice. 

Wrote Modern Painters, vol. ii. 
1846. — Through France and the Jura to Geneva, Mont Cenis, and 

Italy. 
1847. — Tour in Scotland. 
1848. — Married at Perth. Attempted pilgrimage to English 

cathedrals. To Amiens, Paris, and Normandy. Seven Lamps, 

at 31 Park Street. 
1849. — Tour through Switzerland. Winter at Venice. 
1850. — Studied architecture and missals at Venice. Stones of 

Venice, vol. i., at Park Street. 
185 1. — Notes on Sheepfolds. Acquaintance with Carlyle and 

Maurice. Defence of the Pre-Raphaelites. Tour through 

France and Switzerland. Winter and following spring at 

Venice. (Dec. 19. Turner died.) 
1852. — Stones of Venice, vols. li. and iii. 
1853. — With Dr. Acland and Millais at Glenfinlas. Lectures, 

Architecture and Painting, at Edinburgh. 
1854. — With parents in Switzerland. Drawing. Working Men's 

College inaugurated. Lectures to decorative workmen. 
1855. — Acadcfiy A'otcs hcjijini. Studied sliipping at Deal. Mod- 
ern Painters, voL. iii. and iv. 



CHRONOLOGY 285 

1S56. — Address to ^A^Ol■kmen of the Oxford Museum. Tour in 
Switzerland. EUiiicnls of IJi-awiug. 

1857. — Lecture to Archit. Assoc, Imagination in Architecture. 
Address to St. Martin's School of Art. Lecture, Political 
Economy of Art, at Manchester. Address to Working Men's 
College. Tour in Scotland. Arranged Turner drawings at 
National Gallery. 

1858. — Lecture, Conventional Art, S. Kensington. Lecture, Work 
of Iron, Tunbridge Wells. Official Report on Turner be- 
quest. Address, Study of Art, St. Martin's School. Tour 
alone in Switzerland and Italy, studying Veronese at Turin. 
Inaugural address to Cambridge School of Art. 

1859.— Lecture, Unity (?/ ^r/, Royal Institution. 'Le.zXMXt., Mod- 
ern Manufactitre and Design, Bradford. Address, Switzer- 
land, Working Men's College. Last tour with parents, in 
Germany. 

i860. — Address, Religious Art, Working Men's College. Modern 
Painters, vol. v. Unto this Last, at Chamouni. 

1861. — Gave Turner drawings to Oxford and to Cambridge. Ad- 
dresses, St. George's Mission, Denmark Hill ; Three Twigs, 
Royal Institution ; Illuminated Missals, Burlington House. 
Tour in Savoy. Munera Pulveris. 

1862. — Studied Luini at Milan. 

1863. — Studied Limestone Alps. Lecture, Stratified Alps, Royal 
Institution. 

1864. — Lecture at Working Men's College. His father died. 
Lecture, Traffic, Bradford. Lectures, King^s Treasuries and 
Queen's Gardens, and address at Grammar School, Man- 
chester. 

1865. — Lecture, Work and Play, Camberwell. Addresses at 
Working Men's College. Address to R.I.B.A., Study of 
Architecture. Lecture, /F^r, Woolwich Royal Military College. 

1866. — With friends in Switzerland. Study of geology and bot- 
any. Spoke at meeting of the Eyre Defence Committee. 

1867. — Ti7ne and Tide. Rede Lecture. Lecture, Modern Art, 
Royal Institution. 

1868. — Lecture, Mystery of Life, Dublin. Address, Threelegged 
Stool of Art, Jermyn Street. Tour in Belgium and France 
with Professor Norton and others. 



286 CHRONOLOGY 

1869. — Lecture, Flamboyant Architecture of the Somme, Royal 
Institution. Lecture, Greek Myths 0/ Cloud and Storm, Uni- 
versity College. Lecture, Hercules of Camarina, South 
Lambeth School of Art. To F'rance, Switzerland, Verona, 
and Venice. Elected Slade Professor. Lecture, Future of 
England, Woolwich. 

1870. — Lecture, Verona and its Rivers, Royal Institution. First 
and Second Slade courses at Oxford. To Switzerland and 
Italy. Study of coins at the British Museum. Lecture, Story 
of Arachne, Woolwich. 

187 1. — Fors Clavigera, No. i. Slade course on landscape. 
Dangerous illness at Matlock. Tour to Lakes and Scotland. 
Endowment of Mastership of Drawing, at Oxford. Elected 
Lord Rector of St. Andrew's University. His mother died. 

1872. — Lecture, The Bird of Calm, Woolwich. Slade courses. 
Eaglets iVest and Ariadne Florentina. In residence at 
Corpus Christi College. In Italy. First residence at Brant- 
wood. 

1873. — Re-elected Slade Professor. Paper, Nature and Authority 
of Miracle, Grosvenor Hotel. Lectures, Robin, Swallow, 
and Chough, O-aior A and Eton. Slade course, Vald'Arno. 

1874. — To Rome and Sicily, studied Giotto at Assisi. Slade 
course, Alps and Jura, and Schools of Florentine Art. 
Lecture, Botticelli, at Eton. 

1875. — Lecture, Glacial Action, Royal Institution. Slade course. 
Sir Joshua Reynolds. Lecture, Spanish Chapel, Eton. 

1876. — Lectures, Precious Stones, Christ's Hospital ; Alinerals, 
Woolwich. Posting tours in England. To Switzerland. 

1877. — Studied Carpaccio at Venice. Speech to Society for Pre- 
vention of Cruelty to Animals, Heme Hill. Lecture, Yewdale 
and its Streamlets, Kendal. Slade course, Readings in Mod- 
ern Painters. Lecture, Streams of Westmoreland, Eton. 

1878. — At Windsor Castle; at Hawarden. Turner exhibition in 
Bond Street. Illness at Brantwood. Whistler versus Ruskin 
trial. 

1879. — Received Prince Leopold at St. George's Museum, Shef- 
field. 

1880. — Lectures, Snakes, London Institution; Amiens, Eton. To 
Abbeville, Amiens, Beauvais, Chartres, Rouen. 



11 15^' 



CHRONOLOGY 



287 



1882. — Copied in National Gallery. In France and Italy. Met 
Miss Alexander at Florence. Lecture, Cistercian Architecture, 
London Institute. 

1883. — Slade course, Art of England. Lecture, Francesca Alex- 
ander and Kate Greenaway, Kensington. Tour to Scotland. 
Lecture, Sir Herbert Edwards, Conislon. 

1884. — Lecture, The Storm Cloud, London Institution. Lecture 
to Academy Girls. Slade course. The Pleasures of England. 

1885. — Address to Society of Friends of Living Creatures, Bed- 
ford Park. 

l^^b.—Prceterita. 

1887. — A posting journey in England. 

1888. — To Beauvais, the Jura, Venice, Berne. Last No. of 
Prater it a. 

1900. — January 20. Death at Brantwood, Coniston. 



